The research, led by Ana Karla Silva Soares of the Federal University of Mato Grosso do Sul in Brazil, together with Eduardo França do Nascimento, Renata Tereza dos Passos Costa, Alessandro Teixeira Rezende, and Kátia Regina Bazzano da Silva Rosi, set out to answer a deceptively simple question: to what extent, and in which direction, is the imposter phenomenon related to human values and parenting styles among children? While interest in the origins of imposter feelings has grown steadily in recent decades, few studies have explored the possibility that the seeds of this phenomenon are planted in childhood, long before university examinations, doctoral defenses, or workplace promotions provide the achievements that adults feel unworthy of.

To investigate the question, the team recruited 201 elementary school students between the ages of nine and twelve, with an average age of ten and a standard deviation of 1.06. The sample was mostly female, at 54.5 percent, and overwhelmingly drawn from public schools, which accounted for 97.5 percent of participants. The largest single group, 35 percent of the children, was in the fifth year of schooling. Each participant completed a battery of instruments: the Child Impostor Phenomenon Scale, designed to capture imposter feelings in age-appropriate language; the Reduced Parental Perception Questionnaire, which measures how children perceive the emotional and demanding dimensions of their parents’ behavior; the Questionnaire of Basic Values for Children, grounded in the functionalist theory of human values developed by the Brazilian psychologist Valdiney Gouveia; and a set of sociodemographic questions.

The results, published on 23 October 2025, reveal a consistent pattern of negative associations. The imposter phenomenon was significantly and negatively correlated with a demanding parental style, with a correlation coefficient of r = −.14. In other words, children who perceived their parents as more demanding, in the sense of setting expectations, supervising behavior, and requiring accountability, reported fewer imposter feelings, not more. This finding runs counter to a popular intuition that strict, high-expectation parenting breeds self-doubt. Instead, the data suggest that parental demandingness, a core component of the authoritative parenting style first described by developmental psychologist Diana Baumrind in the 1960s, may provide children with the structure and feedback they need to accurately calibrate their sense of their own abilities.

The value measurements added a second layer of insight. Using the functionalist framework, which organizes human values into distinct orientations that guide behavior, the researchers found that imposter feelings were negatively correlated with both interactive values, at r = −.15, and normative values, at r = −.18. Interactive values, in this theoretical tradition, emphasize relationships, affection, and social connection, while normative values emphasize rules, obligations, and respect for established norms. Children who scored higher on these value orientations tended to report fewer feelings of being an intellectual fraud. The interpretation offered by the functionalist perspective is that children who internalize the importance of norms and interpersonal bonds may develop a more stable and socially anchored sense of self, one less vulnerable to the gap between external achievement and internal self-worth that defines the imposter experience.

Perhaps the most technically interesting result concerned moderation. The researchers found that the demanding style of fathers, specifically paternal requirement, moderated the relationship between normative human values and the imposter syndrome in children. Moderation analysis, a statistical technique popularized in psychology by Andrew Hayes, tests whether the strength or direction of an association between two variables depends on the level of a third variable. In this case, the link between a child’s endorsement of normative values and their imposter feelings was not uniform across all levels of paternal demandingness. The father’s behavioral profile, in effect, changed the terrain on which the child’s values operated. This suggests that values and parenting do not act as independent levers on a child’s psychology but interact in ways that researchers are only beginning to map.

The study’s theoretical grounding is worth unpacking. The concept of the imposter phenomenon originated in 1978, when psychologists Pauline Rose Clance and Suzanne Imes described it among high-achieving women in clinical settings. Subsequent work extended the construct to university students, doctoral candidates, and professionals across many fields, and systematic reviews of measurement scales have catalogued a proliferation of instruments designed to quantify it. Research has linked imposter feelings to perfectionism, low self-esteem, social anxiety, self-handicapping, and psychological distress, and studies have repeatedly implicated family background, including parental rearing styles and parental bonding, as formative influences. What has remained scarce is direct evidence from children themselves, rather than adult recollections of childhood, which are vulnerable to memory distortion and retrospective bias.

By measuring imposter feelings in nine- to twelve-year-olds directly, the Brazilian team provides some of the clearest evidence yet that the phenomenon is not confined to adulthood. The use of a dedicated child-scale instrument, whose factor structure was examined with modern exploratory factor analysis techniques, including methods for selecting the number of common factors, reflects a growing methodological sophistication in this literature. The correlations reported, while modest in magnitude, as is typical for single-variable associations in developmental psychology, are statistically meaningful and point in theoretically coherent directions. A demanding parental style and the internalization of interactive and normative values both appear to act as protective factors against the conviction that one’s successes are undeserved.

The findings carry practical implications for parents, educators, and clinicians. If demandingness, understood as consistent expectations and accountability rather than hostility or control, is associated with fewer imposter feelings, then parenting advice that equates warmth with permissiveness may be missing part of the picture. Baumrind’s classic framework distinguished authoritative parenting, which combines demandingness with responsiveness, from both authoritarian and permissive styles, and decades of research have associated the authoritative profile with better emotional and academic outcomes in children. The present study adds a new outcome to that list: a reduced tendency to discount one’s own accomplishments. Similarly, the protective role of normative and interactive values suggests that children who grow up in environments where rules, obligations, and caring relationships are salient may be better insulated against the self-doubt that undermines performance and well-being.

The authors are careful about the limits of their data. The study is correlational, so it cannot establish whether demanding parenting causes lower imposter feelings, whether children who feel less like imposters simply perceive their parents as more demanding, or whether some third factor, such as temperament or socioeconomic conditions, shapes both. The sample, drawn almost entirely from public schools in Brazil, may not generalize to other cultural contexts, and the modest sample size of 201 constrains the precision of the estimates. Data collected from minors are protected by ethical restrictions and are not publicly available, though the authors note they can be shared upon reasonable request with permission from the research ethics committee. The work was funded by Brazil’s National Council for Scientific and Technological Development, and the authors declare no competing interests. Even with these caveats, the study opens a striking window onto the early life of a psychological pattern that has cost countless adults their confidence, and it suggests that the fight against imposter feelings may begin not in the therapist’s office but at the kitchen table, in the daily interplay of expectations, values, and love that shapes who children believe themselves to be.

Subject of Research: The relationship between human values, parenting styles, and the imposter phenomenon in children

Article Title: Evaluating the Role of Human Values and Parenting Styles in the Imposter Syndrome Among Children

Article References: Soares, A. K. S., do Nascimento, E. F., dos Passos Costa, R. T., Rezende, A. T., & da Silva Rosi, K. R. B. (2025). Evaluating the Role of Human Values and Parenting Styles in the Imposter Syndrome Among Children. Trends in Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43076-025-00459-7

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43076-025-00459-7

Keywords: imposter syndrome, imposter phenomenon, parenting styles, human values, child development, developmental psychology, self-esteem, parental demandingness, Brazil, Trends in Psychology, childhood mental health, academic psychology

The research was conducted by Jingqi Guan, Yik Wa Law and Tingyu Luo of the Department of Social Work and Social Administration at the University of Hong Kong. Drawing on a larger sample of 1,515 primary school students, the team identified 241 children as bully-victims and randomly selected an additional 241 pure victims for comparison, creating two groups matched in size. All participants reported repeated bullying-related peer victimization, meaning they had been on the receiving end of aggressive peer behavior more than once — the defining feature of bullying as understood in the classic Olweus framework of repeated aggression involving an imbalance of power.

Rather than asking whether one group is simply “more depressed” or “more anxious” than the other, the researchers adopted a network analysis approach, a method that has gained traction in psychology over the past decade. In the network perspective, mental disorders are not assumed to reflect a single latent disease entity. Instead, symptoms are treated as components that interact with and reinforce one another, forming a network of causal relationships. A symptom such as unhappiness may feed into sleeplessness, which in turn makes it harder to cope with daily activities, and so on. Within such networks, some symptoms occupy more “central” positions than others, meaning they are more strongly connected to the rest of the network and may act as triggers that activate other symptoms. Identifying these central symptoms has become an important goal in clinical research, because highly central symptoms are considered promising targets for intervention: disrupt a central node, the logic goes, and the whole network may be less likely to activate.

To build the symptom networks, the researchers used items from the 12-item General Health Questionnaire, a widely used screening instrument for mental distress that has been validated in Chinese-speaking adolescent populations. Items included experiences such as not enjoying day-to-day activities, feeling unhappy and depressed, feeling constantly under stress, losing confidence in oneself, being unable to overcome difficulties, and losing sleep over worry. Network estimation techniques, including regularized partial correlation methods such as the graphical lasso, were used to derive the connections between symptoms while guarding against spurious associations. The team then compared the resulting network structures between pure victims and bully-victims using statistical procedures designed to test whether the global strength of the networks, and the specific connections within them, differed between groups.

The results were striking in their similarities and suggestive in their differences. Both groups shared the same core symptoms: not enjoying day-to-day activities, feeling unhappy and depressed, and feeling unable to overcome difficulties sat at the center of the distress networks in both cases. Overall, the architecture of the two networks was broadly similar, suggesting that the fundamental structure of psychological distress among repeatedly victimized children does not depend dramatically on whether the child also bullies others. This finding challenges the simple assumption that bully-victims — often described in the literature as the most troubled group, at elevated risk for everything from depression to nonsuicidal self-injury — experience an entirely different kind of psychological pain from pure victims.

Yet the differences, though descriptive rather than definitive, were far from trivial. The item “constantly under stress” appeared to be more central in the networks of pure victims, painting a picture of children who are chronically pressed by their circumstances — perhaps because, without any aggressive counter-response, they endure victimization in a more sustained and one-sided way. By contrast, “losing confidence in oneself” showed higher centrality among bully-victims. This is consistent with a long line of research suggesting that low or unstable self-esteem plays a key role in the making of a bully-victim. The compensation model of aggression holds that some children who are bullied strike back as a way of defending a fragile sense of self-worth, and longitudinal studies have linked low self-esteem both to becoming a perpetrator after victimization and to the persistence of the bully-victim role over time. In a network framework, the centrality of lost confidence in this group suggests that damaged self-esteem may be a hinge around which other distress symptoms organize.

The second half of the study examined how coping strategies were woven into these distress networks, and this is where the picture became more complicated. Coping research, rooted in the classic stress-and-coping theory of Lazarus and Folkman, distinguishes broadly between approach coping — strategies that directly engage the stressor or its emotional consequences, such as seeking social support, solving the problem, or expressing feelings — and avoidance coping, which involves distancing oneself from the problem, denying it, or wishing it away. In the combined coping-and-distress networks, approach coping items were negatively associated with distress symptoms in both groups. In other words, children who leaned on approach strategies tended to show weaker connections to the core of the distress network, hinting that these strategies may act as protective buffers regardless of whether a child is a pure victim or a bully-victim.

Avoidance coping told a different and more troubling story. Among pure victims, avoidance items showed few links with distress at all — the networks were largely silent on the matter. Among bully-victims, however, avoidance coping items showed more heterogeneous connections, some of which were partly adverse. This heterogeneity matters because it suggests that avoidance is not a uniform category with uniform effects. “Doing nothing” in the face of peer victimization has been found in earlier work to be associated with worse depression and even suicidal ideation, yet avoidance can also serve short-term emotional regulation functions in some contexts. The Hong Kong findings add a new layer to this debate by suggesting that the same coping strategy may function differently depending on the child’s position in the bullying dynamic. For bully-victims — children already navigating both victimization and their own aggression — certain forms of avoidance may intertwine with distress in ways that approach coping does not.

The authors are careful to frame their conclusions as preliminary and evidence-informed rather than definitive. Network analysis of cross-sectional data cannot establish causal direction, and centrality measures are known to be influenced by the specific items included and the structure of the instrument used. The random matching of pure victims to bully-victims strengthens the comparison, but the study cannot capture how these networks evolve over time, which is a critical question given that longitudinal research has shown bullying roles can be surprisingly stable and that early aggressive-victim status predicts later mental health problems and functional impairment. Still, the study is notable for focusing on primary school students — a younger population than most bullying research, which tends to concentrate on adolescents — and for doing so in a Chinese cultural context, where whole-day schooling means children spend extended hours in the same peer environment and bullying dynamics may unfold differently than in Western settings.

The practical implications are nonetheless concrete. If approach coping is consistently negatively linked to distress across both roles, then interventions that strengthen problem-solving, help-seeking and emotional expression — hallmarks of social and emotional learning programs, which meta-analyses have shown to produce meaningful improvements in wellbeing — may benefit bullied children broadly. At the same time, the findings caution against one-size-fits-all coping guidance. The observation that avoidance coping behaves differently in bully-victims suggests that school counselors and mental health professionals should assess and coach coping strategies in a role-sensitive, strategy-specific way, rather than simply telling children to “not avoid” the problem. Targeting shared core symptoms — anhedonia in daily activities, depressed mood, and the feeling of being unable to overcome difficulties — could offer another entry point for support, since these symptoms anchor the distress networks in both groups.

In a broader sense, the study contributes to a growing movement in psychology that treats mental distress as a dynamic system rather than a checklist of disorders, and it applies that lens to a population and a problem — young bullied children in East Asia — where such fine-grained analysis has been rare. As schools worldwide grapple with how to support the most entangled participants in bullying, the message from Hong Kong is that victims and bully-victims may suffer in recognizably similar ways, but they may need to be helped in recognizably different ones.

The research, led by Jamie Hanson, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Pittsburgh, involved analyzing data from over 36,000 families. This substantial dataset provided a granular look into how the psychological ramifications of housing insecurity manifest specifically in children. The findings suggest that the emotional toll of eviction-related stress is not just confined to adults but extends deeply into the familial fabric, influencing vulnerable children’s mental health outcomes. It is critical to understand that while adults grapple with anxiety and fear regarding their housing stability, children often internalize these stressors in detrimental ways.

Hanson noted that the results showed a striking correlation between parental anxiety about housing loss and an increased incidence of depression among children. Specifically, the research highlighted that when a caregiver experienced heightened worry related to eviction or foreclosure, children faced a stark rise in depression symptoms—ranging from 10% to 35% more likely to exhibit such issues. This percentage is alarming and signals that conversations around eviction and housing stability should prioritize the mental health of children. A staggering reality is that young children, particularly those under nine years old, are not typically associated with high rates of depression; however, this study reveals that housing instability can significantly shift that narrative.

Understanding the unique vulnerabilities of young children is crucial, as they often rely heavily on their caregivers for emotional support and stability. The findings emphasize that while external circumstances—like financial insecurity—can create turbulence in households, it is the emotional responses to these circumstances that further complicate the psychological landscape for children. A powerful element here is the notion that children’s mental health is intricately linked to their environment and the emotional health of those around them.

Moreover, the study conducted by Hanson detailed that not all mental health issues were influenced by stress related to housing loss. Notably, conditions like Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) and general behavioral problems did not show significant associations with parental stress over housing insecurity, indicating that the impact of eviction stress may be more selective in terms of which mental health challenges it exacerbates in children. This distinction adds a layer of complexity to understanding how different types of stress influence various mental health disorders.

The implications of housing insecurity extend well beyond individual families; they touch upon broader societal issues. Hanson pointed out that eviction and foreclosure disproportionately affect families from minoritized racial and ethnic backgrounds, as well as economically disadvantaged groups. This raises questions about systemic inequities in housing policies and social safety nets, emphasizing that the discussion around children’s mental health must also encompass advocacy for fair housing initiatives and improved social support mechanisms.

As nations grapple with rising housing costs and the potential for increased evictions due to economic realignment, there arises an urgent need for public policies geared towards ameliorating housing instability. The study’s findings advocate for enhanced housing assistance programs that could serve as buffers against the mental health crises stemming from eviction fears. Additionally, the potential for sealing eviction court records for a certain period could alleviate some of the long-term psychological impacts on families, allowing them to recover more fully from the trauma associated with housing loss.

Addressing these complex intersections of housing, mental health, and policy is paramount. Community resources and targeted interventions that focus on both mental health services for children and supportive housing programs could play a critical role in mitigating the risks identified in this research. This dual approach would offer a more comprehensive framework for understanding and tackling the myriad challenges posed by housing insecurity.

In summary, the publication in JAMA Network Open spearheads an essential conversation about the consequences of eviction and housing instability on child mental health. It challenges the narrative that primarily focuses on adult stress, urging researchers, policymakers, and community leaders to acknowledge and address the profound effects that such family crises have on children. The call to action highlights the necessity for systemic changes that safeguard mental well-being and foster stability in housing situations—a crucial component for healthy childhood development.

As we move forward, there is a significant opportunity to enact changes that protect vulnerable populations, especially children, from the cascading effects of housing instability. By placing child welfare at the forefront of discussions regarding housing policies, the potential to cultivate a healthier and more equitable society becomes tangible. The insights gleaned from this research will hopefully inspire multi-faceted efforts to combat the alarming trends in both housing insecurity and child mental health.

Subject of Research: Mental health implications of eviction and housing loss on children.
Article Title: Stress About Eviction or Loss of Housing and Child Mental Health.
News Publication Date: 12-Feb-2025.
Web References: JAMA Network Open
References: N/A
Image Credits: N/A

Keywords: Housing instability, child mental health, eviction, foreclosure, parental stress.