Parenting with a smile: Display rules, regulatory effort, and parental burnout

Abstract

Positive parenting prescriptions prevailing in Western countries encourage parents to regulate their emotions and, more specifically, to show more positive emotion to their children and control negative emotions while parenting. The beneficial effect of this practice on child development has been much documented, but its possible costs for parents have been much less researched. The current study borrowed the well-known emotional labor framework from organizational psychology to examine this issue. We sought to answer five questions in particular: (1) Do parents perceive display rules? (i.e., do they feel pressured to up-regulate positive emotions and down-regulate negative emotions while parenting?) (2) Do parents make regulatory efforts to comply with these rules? (3) Is this costly? (4) Is it possible that these regulatory efforts are associated with higher risk of parental burnout? (5) Are there strategies that render this effort less costly? We investigated these questions in a sample of 347 parents. The results revealed that parents perceive emotional display rules, which were associated with more regulatory efforts and then a higher vulnerability to parental burnout. How parents meet display rules also matters, in that regulating emotions superficially (i.e., surface acting) is more detrimental than regulating genuinely (i.e., deep acting). Overall, these results support the translation of the emotional labor framework to the parenting context, which helps us understand how external pressures on parents may increase parental burnout.