Background and Objectives: The family, as the primary center of socialization, plays a determining role in shaping students' psychological characteristics. Considering this important fact, the present study investigated the effect of parental perfectionism on academic anxiety among ninth-grade female students in public schools of Babol.

Methodology: This applied research employed a descriptive-survey method. The statistical population consisted of all 897 ninth-grade female students in public schools of Babol city. Based on the Krejcie and Morgan table (1970), 269 students were selected through simple random sampling. Data were collected using the Hewitt and Flett (1991) Perfectionism Questionnaire with 30 questions and the Alpert and Haber (1960) Academic Anxiety Questionnaire with 19 questions. The formal and content validity of the questionnaires were confirmed by relevant experts, and their reliability was calculated using Cronbach's alpha coefficient as 0.83 and 0.87, respectively. The collected data were analyzed using univariate and multivariate regression tests.

Findings: The results of data analysis showed that parental perfectionism in general has a significant positive effect on academic anxiety of ninth-grade female students (p < 0.05). Additionally, all three dimensions of perfectionism, including self-oriented perfectionism (β = 0.43), other-oriented perfectionism (β = 0.38), and socially prescribed perfectionism (β = 0.35), individually had a significant positive effect on students' academic anxiety. Among the three dimensions, self-oriented perfectionism showed the highest share in predicting academic anxiety.

Conclusion: The findings of this research clearly demonstrate that parental perfectionism, as an important psychological factor, plays a significant role in creating and exacerbating academic anxiety among students. These results emphasize the necessity of designing and implementing educational programs for parents to moderate perfectionistic expectations and provide specialized guidance to students. It is suggested that awareness-raising workshops about the negative consequences of perfectionism be held for parents, and skill-training programs for coping with academic anxiety be organized for students.