Do You Suffer From Parental Burnout?

Working Mum balancing parenting and work

Source: Vitolda Klein / Unsplash

In 2015, psychologists Isabelle Roskam and Moira Mikolajczak introduced the notion of ‘parental burnout’. The concept spread rapidly, clearly resonating with parents across the world. Roskam and Mikolajczak defined parental burnout as a state of chronic exhaustion related to our parenting role. It can result in guilt and shame, emotional distancing from children, fantasies of escaping, and feelings of being fed up with or regretting our parenting role. Regardless of its causes, burnout is always generated by an imbalance between demand and resources. It emerges in the gap between reality and ideal, and in this case, the gap between how we want to, used to, or feel we should show up as parents and how we actually parent.

Risk factors contributing to parental burnout include unsustainably high parenting ideals, parental perfectionism, lack of family and other support networks, unsupportive partners, and unfair distributions of parenting and household chores. Parental burnout matters not just because it negatively affects parents, but because it obviously also impacts children. In extreme cases, it can result in child neglect and maltreatment.

Interestingly, parental burnout risk factors also include typical individualistic parenting goals and ideals. In a large-scale global study, Roskam et al. (2024) have shown that parental burnout is most prevalent in Western countries characterized by high individualism.[i] The study established that the gap between parenting ideals and realities, lack of social support, and children socialised to put their own desires and preferences first are key burnout drivers.

Children tend to be socialized to comply with the dominant values of their cultures, which in our case include independence, confidence, assertiveness, self-direction, and a striving for power, agency, and control. Children thus primed will be “more self-oriented, more demanding, and less inclined to comply with their parents’ wishes." In other words, they will be headstrong handfuls. Parenting highly individualistic children involves accepting decreased authority and guidance and constant negotiation, compromise, and a need to justify ourselves. Unsurprisingly, this kind of parenting is also extremely time and emotional-labour intensive.

From the beginning of the 20th century onward, we have seen a transition away from authoritarian parenting models toward more authoritative, permissive, warm, and empathetic approaches, although authoritarian models re-surface periodically. The 20th century was of course also the age of psychology, and parenting trends always respond to the emergence of new knowledge. Freud introduced the idea of the pivotal role parents play in the psycho-sexual and psycho-social development of their children. He shone a light on the myriad of things that can go wrong in our early years, and the lasting damage that traumas and microtraumas can cause, including intergenerational ones.

In addition to depth psychology, we also saw the rise of behaviourism, which advocated reward and punishment strategies, rigorous routines, and a hard-nosed don’t kiss, don’t touch, don’t show affection kind of parenting. Permissive, gentle, and empathic parenting became popular in the 1960s, partly thanks to Benjamin Spock’s hugely influential parenting book from 1946, and partly because of a more general anti-authoritarian cultural climate.

Thanks to the rise of positive psychology and mindfulness, as well as increased knowledge of developmental psychology and the neuroscience of parenting, which have clearly shown the damaging effects of authoritarian and neglectful parenting, our current parenting trends are firmly on the compassionate, permissive, and authoritative side of the spectrum. We know how important secure attachment is and also value mental well-being, emotional literacy, and social skills as highly as never before. Current parenting styles include positive parenting, positive discipline, conscious parenting, gentle parenting, and mindful parenting. In less positive terms, we also talk about helicopter-, performance-, and snow-plough parenting.

Shifting patterns and high-cost parenting

Sociologist Markella Rutherford has highlighted some trends that explain why we may feel so energy- and time-poor as parents. Analyzing parenting advice from the early 20th century into the early 21st century, she has found that children’s public autonomy has declined greatly across that period. In the 1960s and 70s, children used to walk or cycle alone to school, roamed and played alone or in tribes in neighborhoods and nature, and ran meaningful errands for their parents.[ii] Nowadays, many of us drive our children everywhere, including to school.

Whilst our kids’ freedom to roam in public has massively decreased, their freedom to call the shots at home has increased: They decide what to wear, eat (beige food anyone?), how to talk, how to spend their time. In the past, children were expected to do chores and help with household management, and later to earn their own pocket money with small jobs such as newspaper delivery, babysitting, and lawn mowing. Today, parents do most of the chores and also chauffeur their children around from one extracurricular activity, playdate, or birthday party to another. Many mothers are also basically PAs for our kids, managing their increasingly complex social lives via WhatsApp and other channels. Many parents are also performance parenting – getting heavily involved in their children’s education, supervising homework, arts-and-crafts projects, music and sport practice, etc.

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It is thus not surprising that William Davies confirms what our tired minds and bodies have been whispering to us for a while: “Time-use studies have made the finding – perplexing, but only at first glance – that both men and women are spending both more hours a week ‘parenting’ and more hours doing paid work than was the case in the 1970s.”[iii]

Science and values

The driving force behind the compassionate turn in parenting styles, Sarah Ockwell-Smith writes, is “the development of science and the ability to prove the impact of care, via neurological imaging and ever more sophisticated psychological experiments.”[iv] That is definitely true, but it is also true that parenting is always related to transmitting the values we cherish as a society more broadly.

In the past, child rearing revolved around transmitting values such as godliness, the classical virtues, character strength, obedience, service, and duty. Nowadays, we cherish independence, imagination, originality, self-expression, authenticity, self-realization, perfectionism, emotional well-being, happiness, and fulfillment.[v] In other words, there is a clear shift from relational to individualist values. In yet other words, there is also a shift from pretty low-energy parenting styles to high labour- and time-intensive styles.

It is an obvious but nevertheless important point to make that parenting for obedience is a much less time- and emotional-labour-intensive exercise than is parenting for independence, critical thinking, uniqueness, and imaginative attunement. In addition, parenting stakes have never been higher:
Because of what we know about depth and developmental psychology, we are now hyper-attuned to and fearful of the damage that our parenting can inadvertently cause. Social pressure on parenting is also higher than ever: Parenting ideals and ideologies are bandied around on social media, TV, and in women’s magazines, and of course in numerous parenting advice books. Our demand for this kind of advice has risen because we no longer live in multi-generational households in which we can benefit from the advice of elders.

‘Good enough’ parenting

It is a truth universally acknowledged that burnout grows in the gap between our ideals and our lived experience. I therefore want to conclude by saying this: Our parenting ideals have never been higher, more high-stakes, more time- and emotional-labour intensive, and more socially pressurized than they are right now. Combine this with the crisis of work, and our general sense of time-scarcity and overwhelm, and you have a toxic cocktail.

Be thus excessively gentle with yourselves. The shifts and tendencies I outlined above are of course all largely positive and largely desirable, and we should not glorify or aim to return to bygone, outdated, and damaging forms of parenting. I simply long for a reactivation of slightly more sensible and pragmatic parenting ideals, such as Donald Winnicott’s “good enough” parenting advice.