Parenting exhaustion and stress in daily life: A temporal network approach

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

Many 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 and children. However, uncertainty persists about 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 (preprint here: https://psyarxiv.com/aef27/), we recruited 50 unselected parents 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. Contextual variables also interact with parental burnout features, illustrating the relevance of examining parenting within the family system context. If future research confirms a central role of exhaustion in parental burnout development, prevention efforts can focus on decreasing parental exhaustion. We are currently collecting data using the same methodology for parents in a severe state of parental burnout, and we plan to also present the preliminary findings from that cohort, to compare the daily experiences of parents from the general population with parents in burnout.