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

Abstract

Some parents experience intense emotional exhaustion, emotional distance, and feeling fed up. Researchers have termed this parental burnout and propose that it arises when parents endure severe stress without sufficient resources to compensate. However, many parents experience such features occasionally, since parenting is an experience that changes daily with its context. We therefore recruited 47 parents to rate 11 variables (including the core features of parental burnout and the family context) daily over eight weeks. We used multilevel vector-autoregressive models to generate three networks. Results suggest that exhaustion is implicated in the onset of parental burnout, as it self-predicts and forms a feedback loop with feeling fed up and finding children difficult to manage. Distance, by contrast, is mainly connected to sharing positive moments with children. Contextual variables also interact with parental burnout features, illustrating the relevance of examining parenting within the family system context.

Parental and Pandemic Burnout, Internalizing Symptoms, and Parent-Adolescent Relationships: A Network Analysis

“…Our results are in concordance with previous findings about the central role reactions to short-term stressors or persistent stressors (such as the pandemic) and parental burnout (cf., Bringmann et al, 2013). Although the present study showed the central role of emotional exhaustion in parental burnout only in a cross-sectionally measured network of symptoms, other studies also indicated that in temporal networks, emotional exhaustion plays a central role and activates other symptoms of parental burnout (Blanchard, Hoebeke, & Heeren, 2022).…”