Parental burnout (Mikolajczak and Roskam)
A state that grows out of long-term parenting stress with too few resources to meet it. The parent is exhausted by parenting itself, feels like a different and worse parent than before, is fed up with the role, and pulls back emotionally from the children while still doing the practical care.
What drives it
The demands of parenting outweigh what the parent has to meet them with (sleep, help, money, a child’s easier temperament, a partner who shares it), and there is no leave to take from a child. Useful for identification because the parent often reads the distance as proof they are a bad parent, when it may be a sign of depletion that has its own causes.
How it shows
Work
Work starts to feel like the rest. Staying late or taking an extra shift with some relief, then guilt about the relief. Colleagues see someone capable who falls apart at the phrase ‘pickup at five’.
Relationships
Going through bath and bedtime on autopilot and feeling nothing when the child says ‘I love you’. Snapping at small things and then lying awake over it. Telling a partner ‘I can’t do this anymore’ and meaning the parenting.
Self
Notice whether the tiredness is about the children in particular, whether a weekend without them restores you, and whether you catch yourself picturing leaving or disappearing for a while.
What tells it apart
Burnout: Job burnout comes from work and may ease with a role change or leave. Parental burnout comes from the parenting role, and someone may love their job and still be burnt out at home.
Major depression: Depression is more likely when the low mood, loss of pleasure and self-blame run through every part of life. In parental burnout the exhaustion and distance center on the children, though the two often come together.
Postpartum depression (perinatal depression): In the first year after a birth, low mood and loss of interest may be postpartum depression, which can be assessed and treated. Parental burnout more often builds over years of parenting and can come at any age of the child.
A test
Ask whether the exhaustion lifts on a day or two away from the children while it stays the same at work and with friends, and whether the parent feels further from the children than they did a year ago. Yes to both may point to parental burnout, which the Parental Burnout Assessment can measure.
Questions to carry
- At what point in the day did I last feel nothing toward my child, and what had the day already taken out of me?
- What would I have to admit about my limits if I said I am burnt out as a parent?
Go deeper
- Read: The Kazdin Method for Parenting the Defiant Child, Alan E. Kazdin with Carlo Rotella, 2008. Written for parents by a Yale psychologist who spent decades testing parent management training: praise and small rewards for the behavior a parent wants to see, built up in small steps. That approach has many controlled trials behind it with children referred for defiance and aggression, though Kazdin's own 1997 review said questions remained about how large, wide and lasting the effects are. The book itself does not walk through the studies. It carries the Association for Behavioral and Cognitive Therapies' Self-Help Seal of Merit.
- Study: Parental Burnout Around the Globe: a 42-Country Study, Isabelle Roskam, Moïra Mikolajczak and 93 others, Affective Science, 2021. Asked 17,409 parents in 42 countries, 71% of them mothers, the same burnout questions. Rates differed sharply between countries and ran higher where the culture is more individualistic, as in much of the West. Individualism counted for more than income inequality or the number and age of children. Most countries found parents through convenience or snowball sampling, so no country's figure stands for all its parents, and a survey taken once can't show that culture causes burnout. Free to read.
How strong the research is
moderate. Roskam, Brianda and Mikolajczak built the Parental Burnout Assessment in 2018 from 901 English- and French-speaking parents, with four parts: exhaustion in the parenting role, contrast with the parent one used to be, being fed up with parenting, and emotional distance from one’s children. In a study of 17,409 parents in 42 countries (Roskam and colleagues, Affective Science, 2021), levels varied widely between countries and were higher where the culture is more individualistic, a bigger factor than the number or age of the children or the hours spent with them. A longitudinal study of Belgian parents (Mikolajczak, Gross and Roskam, Clinical Psychological Science, 2019) found burnout predicted later thoughts of escape, neglect and harsh treatment of children, though all of it was self-report and about three in four parents dropped out before the last survey.
Where it comes from
Moïra Mikolajczak and Isabelle Roskam at UCLouvain, Belgium, from 2017. Isabelle Roskam, Maria-Elena Brianda and Moïra Mikolajczak, Parental Burnout Assessment, Frontiers in Psychology, 2018
On the family tree: Moïra Mikolajczak and Isabelle Roskam