Parental Burnout: What Is It, and Why Does It Matter?

By M. Mikolajczak, James J. Gross, I. Roskam. Clinical psychological science : a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, 2019

387 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Parenting can be wonderful. However, it also can be stressful, and when parents lack the resources needed to handle stressors related to parenting, they may develop parental burnout. This condition is characterized by an overwhelming exhaustion related to one’s parental role, an emotional distancing from one’s children, and a sense of parental ineffectiveness. Researchers have begun to document the antecedents of parental burnout, but little is known about its consequences. Here we investigated the impact of parental burnout on escape ideation, parental neglect, and parental violence through two cross-lagged longitudinal studies (N = 918, N = 822) that involved the completion of online surveys three times over a year. Results indicated that parental burnout strongly increases escape ideation as well as neglectful and violent behaviors toward one’s children (aggregated Cohen’s d = 1.31, 1.25, and 1.25, respectively). These findings show that parental burnout is a serious condition that urgently requires more attention.

Subfields: Clinical Psychology, Radiological and Ultrasound Technology, Social Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/618da363d8dbd8472b9fe28bfc735e5b64e5ab84

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Citations in the corpus

Gender Differences in the Nature, Antecedents and Consequences of Parental Burnout (2020, background): “Longitudinal findings have provided evidence about the direction of causation and shown that parental burnout increases escape ideation, child neglect, and parental violence rather than the reverse (Mikolajczak et al. 2019).”
Is Parental Burnout Distinct From Job Burnout and Depressive Symptoms? (2020, methodology): “Escape and suicidal ideations were assessed with three items (see Mikolajczak et al., 2019): two items measuring family escape ideations (“I want to leave everything and start a new life” and “I want to go away without leaving any address”) and one item measuring suicidal thoughts (“I have…”
Burnout Assessment Tool (BAT)—Development, Validity, and Reliability (2020, background): “Recently, it has been claimed that parents can suffer from burnout as well [30].”