Parental burnout features and their family context: A temporal network approach

Blanchard, Annelise [UCL] Hoebeke, Yorgo [UCL] Heeren, Alexandre [UCL]

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 chronically endure severe stress without sufficient resources to compensate, and parental burnout can lead to escape ideations, marital conflict, and neglect and violence toward children. 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, leading to a maximum of 56 datapoints per person. 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. If future research confirms the central role of exhaustion in the development of parental burnout, prevention efforts can focus on lessening parental exhaustion in general and at-risk populations.