Impacts of Parental Burnout on Chinese Youth’s Mental Health: The Role of Parents’ Autonomy Support and Emotion Regulation

Abstract

Parental burnout is a state that parents experience overwhelming exhaustion in their parental role. Given the detrimental impacts of parents’ stress on adolescent development, youth may suffer from undesirable emotional adjustment due to parental burnout. Therefore, it is key to understand the underlying mechanisms through which parental burnout may play a role in youth’s mental health and identify protective factors that may reduce the potential negative impacts. Using a sample of 442 Chinese parent-adolescent dyads (Mean age of youth = 13.35 years; 50% girls), this two-wave longitudinal study examined how parental burnout contributes to youth’s mental health over the span of two months. Moreover, the current research investigated the potential mediating role of autonomy support and the potential moderating role of emotion regulation in the links between parental burnout and youth’s mental health. The results showed that greater parental burnout was predictive of youth’s greater depressive and anxiety symptoms two months later, and such effects were partially mediated by less autonomy-supportive parenting. Notably, the negative effects of parental burnout on autonomy-supportive parenting and youth’s mental health were not significant when parents used more cognitive reappraisal to regulate their emotions. These findings demonstrate the underlying mechanisms of how parental burnout affects youth’s mental health over time and highlight the protective role of healthy emotion regulation against parental burnout.

The positive role of parental attachment and communication in Chinese adolescents' health behavior and mental health during COVID‐19

“…The results are consistent with prior studies that found attachment security's positive associations with adolescents' COVID-19- related health behavior during COVID-19 (Coulombe & Yates, 2022) and general health behavior during a normal time (Bender & Ingram, 2018). Moreover, results of the current study add to the body of literature on the role of family context (e.g., parent−child relationship and parenting practices) in adolescent' mental health during the pandemic (Eales et al, 2021;Qu et al, 2021;Skinner et al, 2021;Yang et al, 2021). In line with prior studies on the protective role of secure attachment in children's mental health (Brumariu & Kerns, 2010), attachment security was associated with adolescents' less depressive and anxiety symptoms over time, controlling for adolescents' prior depressive/anxiety symptoms and other covariates.…”

Chinese mothers’ parental burnout and adolescents’ internalizing and externalizing problems: The mediating role of maternal hostility.

“…There are several reasons to explain this finding. First, it is possible that parental burnout may play a direct role in adolescents' internalizing problems over a longer period of time or during a time when adolescents' mental health may be more vulnerable to change (e.g., during the COVID pandemic; Yang et al, 2021). Second, this finding may imply that mother-child relationships (i.e., parental hostility toward the child) may be more predictive of adolescents' internalizing problems than mothers' individual factors (i.e., parental burnout).…”

Parental burnout features & their family context: A temporal network approach in mothers

“…Until now, most research has utilized a cross-sectional approach and only investigated parental burnout at one timepoint. There are a growing number of longitudinal studies, but most did not investigate the evolution of the different features of parental burnout (e.g., Mikolajczak et al, 2019;Yang et al, 2021). Among the few studies that did (e.g., Aguiar et al, 2021;, they demonstrate that the features evolve in different patterns-and suggest that emotional exhaustion is the first step to developing parental burnout.…”