The relationship between parent’s mental health and professional functioning and students’ e-learning burnout and well-being during the COVID-19 pandemic

Abstract

Student burnout is an issue rarely analysed in Polish literature, and even fewer studies take into account the knowledge of parents about such an educational problem. So far, only a few studies have focused on the psychological characteristics of parents related to school burnout, such as the quality of family relationships, attachment style, parental attitudes or upbringing style. However, there are no studies in the literature that take into account both the children’s and the parents’ psychological characteristics associated with school burnout. Therefore, the main aim of the current study was to test whether mental health and parental professional functioning characteristics are related to the student online school burnout syndrome during the COVID-19 pandemic. The analysis covered 29 parent-adolescent dyads. In the entire group of respondents, the significant relationship between the student burnout symptoms perceived by parents and the online school burnout from the students’ perspective was confirmed. Student burnout with distance learning correlated positively with the mental health problems of parents and negatively with the well-being of students. Student burnout from distance learning did not significantly correlate with work flow and online job burnout of parents. The findings indicated the importance of the simultaneous evaluation of the problem of educational burnout by the parent-adolescent dyad. In this context, the active involvement of parents in preventive interventions regarding the mental health of their children can be an important factor contributing to minimising the risk of developing school burnout symptoms.n