Parental burnout features and the family context: A temporal network approach in mothers.

Journal of Family Psychology, Vol 37(3), Apr 2023, 398-407; doi:10.1037/fam0001070Many parents have days where they encounter emotional exhaustion, emotional distance from their children, and feeling fed up with being a parent. Some parents experience these characteristics to a severe extent—a clinical phenomenon termed parental burnout. Parental burnout arises when parents chronically endure severe stress without sufficient resources to cope, which may lead to detrimental consequences not only for the parent but also for their partner (e.g., marital conflict) and children (i.e., neglect and violence). However, uncertainty remains regarding how these features interact and trigger one another over time (potentially becoming increasingly severe), nor how the daily variations of the family context influence these features. Therefore, in this study, we recruited 50 parents (with main analyses focusing on 43 mothers with a co-parent, and sensitivity analyses with the full sample) from the general population to rate the core features of parental burnout and the family context daily over 56 days. We used multilevel vector autoregressive models to generate network models. Results suggest that exhaustion contributes to parental burnout: It self-predicts and is closely associated with feeling fed up and finding children difficult to manage. Distance, by contrast, is mainly negatively connected to sharing positive moments with children. Contextual variables also interact with parental...
Source: Journal of Family Psychology - Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research