Exhausted Parents: Sociodemographic, Child-Related, Parent-Related, Parenting and Family-Functioning Correlates of Parental Burnout

Abstract

Parental burnout is a specific syndrome resulting from enduring exposure to chronic parenting stress. It encompasses three dimensions: an overwhelming exhaustion related to one’s parental role, an emotional distancing with one’s children and a sense of ineffectiveness in one’s parental role. This study aims to facilitate further identification of antecedents/risk factors for parental burnout in order to inform prevention and intervention practices. In a sample of 1723 french-speaking parents, we examined the relationship between parental burnout and 38 factors belonging to five categories: sociodemographics, particularities of the child, stable traits of the parent, parenting and family-functioning. In 862 parents, we first examined how far these theoretically relevant risk factors correlate with burnout. We then examined their relative weight in predicting burnout and the amount of total explained variance. We kept only the significant factors to draw a preliminary model of risk factors for burnout and tested this model on another sample of 861 parents. The results suggested that parental burnout is a multi-determined syndrome mainly predicted by three sets of factors: parent’s stable traits, parenting and family-functioning.