The impact of parental burnout

Candice Roquemore Bonner, PsyD, a clinical psychology resident at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, knows the parenting-while-working juggle well. She moved to Boston with her two children to begin her residency in June 2020, functioning solo until her husband could join them. Managing her burgeoning career and her family’s well-being—all during a global pandemic—often left her own self-interest neglected. As a result, she said perpetual exhaustion and high-level irritability became part of her daily routine.

“I’ve been a working student and parent for 5 years, so it’s been a constant juggling act,” Roquemore Bonner said. “But this year elevated my sense of burnout because there was simply no escape.”

The United States has mostly lifted pandemic restrictions (and reinstated some to protect against the Covid-19 Delta variant). Birthday parties are in full swing, youth sports are back, and families are rushing from one activity to the next. While this may be the light at the end of the tunnel people had been eagerly anticipating, parents never had a chance to recover from pandemic burnout before bursting into this new Delta variant phase—which only heightens their risk for issues going forward.

Burnout, a syndrome characterized by “emotional exhaustion, depersonalization and a decrease in self-fulfillment,” is a result of chronic exposure to emotionally draining environments (Rionda, I. S., et al., International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Healthopens in new window, Vol. 18, No. 9, 2021).

In 2019, the World Health Organization recognized burnout syndrome in its International Classification of Diseases as an occupational condition linked to several health symptoms, such as fatigue, changing sleep habits, and substance use. While burnout is most associated with helping occupations like health care or high-pressure professions like law or finance, a growing body of research suggests burnout can also occur in other roles, particularly with the strain of navigating post-pandemic life.

As Lucy McBride, MD, a practicing internist in Washington, D.C., and author of a widely read Covid-19 newsletter describes it, burnout is the “mental and physical fallout from accumulated stress in any sphere of life,” including parenting (The Atlanticopens in new window, June 30, 2021). The first research on parental burnout took place in the United States in the 1980s, focusing on parents of children with tumors (Procaccini, J., and Kiefaber, M. W., Parent Burnoutopens in new window, Doubleday, 1983). More recently, Belgian researchers including Isabelle Roskamopens in new window, PhD, and Moïra Mikolajczak, PhD, both professors of psychology at the Catholic University of Louvain in Belgium, theorized that while severe situations such as a sick child can contribute to burnout, any parent can experience it.

In 2018, Roskam and her colleagues developed a measurement called the Parental Burnout Assessment after surveying more than 900 parents they had determined to be experiencing burnout. From these subjects’ testimonies, the researchers extracted four dimensions of parental burnout: exhaustion in one’s parental role, contrast with previous parental self, feelings of being fed up with one’s parental role, and emotional distancing from one’s children.

To learn more about what causes burnout, they later studied more than 17,000 parents in 42 countries around the world and discovered burnout varied drastically by country, based on the differences in Eastern and Western cultural values (Affective Scienceopens in new window, Vol. 2, 2021). A smaller follow-up study yet to be published suggests rates increased among some populations during Covid-19.

Research by psychologists at the University of Melbourne confirmed those findings in their own study, with all participants reporting higher levels of mental distress during the pandemic but parents of school-age kids reporting much higher rates. The researchers estimated that more than one quarter of Australia’s 1.5 million working parents with kids ages 5 to 11 experienced high levels of mental distress during the pandemic, and working parents who were also the primary caregiver were four times as likely to suffer as working parents who weren’t simultaneously tending the children (Melbourne Instituteopens in new window, 2020).

According to Roskam, one component was consistent among all parents who reported burnout, before and during the pandemic. “Burnout is the result of too much stress and the absence of resources to cope with it,” she said. “You will burn out only if there is an imbalance between stress and resources.”

The Parental Burnout Assessment captures the primary symptoms of burnout, which, according to Mikolajczak, usually occur in stages.

The first stage, she said, is overwhelming exhaustion. Depending on how old the children are, parents might experience different types of exhaustion; for example, ­Mikolajczak said parents of young children tend to be more physically tired, while those with adolescents or teens may experience emotional exhaustion because of conflicts with their children.

Inger Burnett-Zeigleropens in new window, PhD, an associate professor of psychology at the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, said the pandemic exacerbated the existing issue of exhaustion and burnout among parents she works with at Northwestern’s Asher Center for the Study and Treatment of Depressive Disorders. Many parents, she said, focused on child care and homeschooling during the day, relegating their jobs to the evening and, as a result, becoming more irritable and stressed the next day. Typically, she said, burned-out parents present with chronic stress about how they’ll get everything done. “That can disrupt sleep, which exacerbates the anxiety and irritability; then it becomes this loop that repeats itself daily,” she said.

Next, burned-out parents tend to distance themselves from their kids to preserve their energy. This phase is followed by a third phase when parents notice a loss of fulfillment in parenting. “These parents will tell you, ‘I love my children, but I can’t stand being around them anymore; actually, I can’t stand being a parent anymore,’” Mikolajczak said.

As with job burnout, parental burnout symptoms build on each other; the phase one exhaustion sticks around through the distancing and loss of fulfillment. As a result, Roskam said, parents with burnout typically report a contrast between the parents they were, the parents they would like to be, and the parents they have become. This contrast, she added, can cause burned-out parents to feel inescapable distress, shame, and guilt.

While job burnout can cause significant problems in people’s lives, the consequences of parental burnout are different. Unlike a job, parents don’t get paid vacation, and they can’t leave their roles to parent other kids the way that someone with occupational burnout can find a new position.

Because burned-out parents often feel trapped in their roles, they may also experience more severe consequences than people experiencing job burnout, such as suicidal and escape ideations (Mikolajczak, M., et al., Clinical Psychological Scienceopens in new window, Vol. 7, No. 6, 2019). Mikolajczak and colleagues found these ideations were more frequent in parental burnout than in job burnout or depression (Clinical Psychological Scienceopens in new window, Vol. 8, No. 4, 2020).

Burnout can also cause parents to be violent or neglectful toward children, even when the parents are philosophically opposed to those behaviors. In an as-yet-unpublished 2020 study, Annette Griffithopens in new window, PhD, a professor of psychology at The Chicago School of Professional Psychology, found that parents who indicated higher levels of burnout also indicated higher levels of coercive or punitive parenting practices, and the parents who reported the biggest change of burnout level from January to June 2020 had the highest risk for child maltreatment.

The finding that rates of parental burnout increased during the pandemic are unsurprising, as Griffith found many of the conditions present during the pandemic, such as financial insecurity, lack of support, and social isolation, have been found to be risk factors for parental burnout prior to the pandemic (Journal of Family Violenceopens in new window, Vol. 29, No. 4, 2020).

Whether a burned-out parent screams at or spanks their child, this behavior doesn’t only harm kids; Mikolajczak said burnout symptoms and consequences can create a vicious cycle. “Parents who do these things often feel shame, so they ruminate on their behavior, then they wake up the next day more tired and sensitive, which compounds the negative behaviors,” she said.

Research shows that certain populations are more prone to parental burnout. A study by the International Investigation of Parental Burnout (IIPB) Consortium, which included Roskam and Mikolajczak, found cultural norms, for example, play a significant role in predicting burnout: Parents from more individualistic (typically Western) countries had higher rates of parental burnout than those from Eastern countries (Affective Scienceopens in new window, Vol. 2, 2021).

Individualistic cultures tend to value competition, performance, and perfectionism, which increases stress, all the while decreasing resources by discouraging parents from asking for support. And while Eastern cultures typically prioritize children’s obedience and respect toward elders, Roskam said Western cultures commonly assert values of self-improvement or independence, which means children can be less likely to follow instructions.

People already experiencing multiple stressors, such as single parents, parents of special needs children, and immigrant parents, may also have a lower threshold for increasing stress because of the ongoing demands of parenting.

“If there are groups already experiencing prolonged chronic stressors, they are going to be at higher risk for vulnerability to mental health issues and burnout,” said Lisa Coyneopens in new window, PhD, a senior clinical consultant at McLean Hospital OCD Institute in Massachusetts and an assistant professor of psychology at Harvard Medical School.

Compounding individual risk factors with systemic oppression can further heighten that vulnerability. Riana Elyse Andersonopens in new window, PhD, an assistant professor of health behavior and health education at the University of Michigan, said parents of color face unique strain, especially during the pandemic.

Alongside everyone’s fears of contracting Covid-19 and ongoing racial trauma in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, Black parents are also less likely to have protective factors like economic security and feelings of social support. “The pandemic really pointed to how challenging it was to manage all these stressors with thinning coping resources,” said Anderson.

Robyn Koslowitzopens in new window, PhD, a clinical psychologist and director of the Center for Psychological Growth of New Jersey, said some parents who had traumatic childhoods tend to carry unproductive beliefs about their role as parents. “Many clients I work with believe they don’t have the same capacity other parents have because they never exper­ienced normal parenting,” she said. “That shame can contribute highly to burnout.”

As common as parental burnout is, parents can use what psychologists have discovered about risk factors to both reduce their risk and mitigate existing symptoms by finding creative ways to rebalance their stress and resources.