Article summary with Parental burnout: Moving the focus from children to parents by Mikolajczak & Roskam - 2020

What is parental burnout?

Parental burnout is when parenting stress severely and chronically overwhelm parents’ resources to cope. It manifests through four main symptoms. The number and frequency of the symptoms are direct indicators of the severity of the burnout. The symptoms are:

• Parents feel exhausted and run down by their parenting role.

• Parents detach themselves emotionally from their children.

• Parents lose pleasure in parenting and don’t enjoy being with their children anymore.

• Parents don’t recognize themselves as the parent they used and wanted to be.

What are the negative consequences of parental burnout?

Parental burnout can lead to suicidal ideations, psychological escape through substance use, a dysregulation in the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis (causing sleep disorders), and an increase in the violence against children. It also deteriorates the parent-child relationship and the couple relationship.

What causes parental burnout?

A wide range of factors can either slightly or greatly increase the vulnerability to parental burnout. Most parents have the known risk factors present in their lives, but risk factors rarely exist in the absence of resources to compensate for their effect. It is when the balance between risks and resources chronically leans to the wrong side that parental burnout occurs. The known risk factors are:

• Aiming to be a perfect parent.

• Being neurotic or lacking emotion and stress management abilities.

• Lacking emotional or practical support.

• Having children with special needs that interfere with family life.

• Having poor child-rearing practices.

• Working part-time or being a stay-at-home-parent.

How can parental burnout be measured?

Two instruments to measure parental burnout are the Parental Burnout Inventory and the Parental Burnout Assessment.

• The Parental Burnout Inventory suggests that parental burnout has three main symptoms: exhaustion related to one’s parental role, emotional distancing from one’s children, and loss of parental efficiency.

• The Parental Burnout Assessment believes that there are four symptoms to parental burnout: exhaustion related to one’s parental role, emotional distancing from one’s children, feelings of being fed up with one’s parental role, and contrast with how the parents used to be and wanted to be.