Differences in Parental Burnout: Influence of Demographic Factors and Personality of Parents and Children

Abstract

Parental burnout is a syndrome related to parenthood and characterized by three dimensions: emotional and physical exhaustion, emotional distancing of parents from their children, and loss of parental accomplishment. Many factors can explain the interindividual differences in parental burnout (Roskam et al., 2017). In a study conducted among 372 French parents, we examined the relationship between parental burnout, demographic factors (age of parent and child(ren), age of parent at first birth, total number of children, and number of children present in the family home) and parent-assessed dispositional factors (personality traits of parent and child(ren)). Results for demographic factors showed that the younger the parents we surveyed, the higher their reported sense of parental accomplishment, although they also tended to feel more exhausted. We observed a similar pattern of results when we looked at the children’s ages. In addition, the number of children at home slightly increased the emotional distance between parent and child(ren). Results for the parents’ dispositional factors showed that all three personality traits we investigated, as well as their different facets (lack of emotional control and lack of impulse control for neuroticism, meticulousness and perseverance for conscientiousness, and cooperation and friendliness for agreeableness), were related to parental burnout and its three dimensions. More specifically, parental meticulousness and lack of emotional control were both risk factors for developing parental burnout. By contrast, agreeableness and perseverance were protective factors. With regard to the children, the same three personality traits were linked to the three dimensions of parental burnout. Having children they perceived as having a high level of neuroticism reduced parents’ sense of parental accomplishment and increased their emotional exhaustion and distancing. The opposite relationships were found for agreeableness and conscientiousness. There were no significant relationships between parental assessments of their children’ extraversion and openness and parental burnout and its three dimensions. The parent’s personality explained 42.3% of the variance in parental burnout, and the child(ren)’s personality (parent-assessed) explained 13.8%. Taken together, these results demonstrate the importance of considering the personality of both parents and children in the study of parental burnout.

Women’s mental health: acute impact of COVID-19 pandemic on domestic violence

“…This burden could have increased due to the temporary closure of schools during the lockdown. In fact, being a young parent, being a first-time parent, having many children, or having infants has been reported as being a potential source of exhaustion and may lead to parental burnout (Vigouroux and Scola 2018 ). However, our results did not find any link between the number of children and the severity of distress symptoms.…”

Parental burnout in Romania: Validity of the Romanian version of the parental burnout assessment (PBA‐RO)

“…In the third hypothesis, we supposed low associations between parental burnout and sociodemographic variables. This assumption was based on previous findings (Le Vigouroux & Scola, 2018;Lebert-Charron et al, 2018;Lindström, Aman, & Lindhal-Norberg, 2011;Mikolajczak, Raes et al, 2018;Roskam et al, 2017Roskam et al, , 2018.…”

Parental burnout in Iran: Psychometric properties of the Persian (Farsi) version of the Parental Burnout Assessment (PBA)

“…Actually, research has already shown that some factors including the age of mothers (especially when the first child is born) and children, the number of children (Le Vigouroux & Scola, 2018;Mikolajczak et al, 2018b), the number and gender of caregivers (Mikolajczak et al, 2018b), having an adopted child (Denby, Rindfleisch, & Bean, 1999) or having children with disorders or diseases (Blanchard, Gurka, & Blackman, 2006;Lindström, Åman, & Norberg, 2011;Mousavi, 2020;Norberg, 2007), shorter length of the marriage (Mousavi, 2020), low level of mother's knowledge about parenting, poor perception of child's needs, a too high or too low sense of responsibility in mothers, the quality of the father's presence at home (Alikhani et al, 2013) all influence the risk of exhaustion in parents. However, personal factors such as low emotional intelligence, low parental self-efficacy beliefs, as well as some interpersonal factors such as poor parenting practices, lack of cooperation between parents, all play an even stronger role in parental burnout than sociodemographic factors (Mikolajczak et al, 2018b).…”