Parental burnout: who it affects and why

2023-05-04 · 5 min read

By the kava.fyi editorial team · Last updated: 4 May 2023

Where parental burnout came from as a public topic

The concept of parental burnout appeared in the psychological literature as far back as the 1980s, but it was the work of the Belgian researchers Isabelle Roskam and Moïra Mikolajczak that gave it a scientific framework and carried it beyond specialist circles. The analogy with occupational burnout is no accident: the two researchers directly adapted a tool for measuring workplace burnout, the Maslach Burnout Inventory, for use with parenting.

Four dimensions of burnout

The Parental Burnout Assessment questionnaire developed by this team describes parental burnout across four dimensions.

Emotional exhaustion tied to the parenting role: chronic tiredness, a lack of patience, a sense that parenting has become a burden.
Contrast with your former self as a parent: a sense that you used to be a more engaged, patient and present parent, and no longer have the resources for it.
Loss of pleasure and satisfaction in being a parent: the disappearance of joy in small, everyday moments spent with your child.
Emotional distancing from children: limiting contact to meeting basic needs, coldness, sometimes treating the child as a duty to tick off.

Who it affects most

Roskam and Mikolajczak's research shows that parental burnout affects mothers more often than fathers, which the researchers link, among other things, to social pressure and the idealised image of parenting reinforced on social media. People from individualistic cultures also burn out more often than those from collectivist ones, as do nuclear families compared with multigenerational ones, and among personality traits, maladaptive perfectionism, neuroticism, introversion and lower emotional competence correlate most strongly with the phenomenon. Additional risk factors include a child's health problems, especially disability, as well as a weak financial situation or a sense of lost career prospects. Parents themselves are often the last to notice these symptoms in themselves, because the social expectation that parenting should be a source of nothing but fulfilment makes it hard to admit, even to yourself, that something is wrong.

Poland at the top of the global ranking

In 2018 and 2019, the same team, together with dozens of collaborators from around the world, ran a study covering 42 countries and more than 17,000 parents. Poland came top of the list, with the highest average level of burnout of all the countries studied, ahead of Belgium and Canada, while the lowest scores were recorded in Thailand and Cuba. The study's authors found that the strongest predictor of parental burnout was not income, economic inequality or the number of hours spent with a child, but the degree of individualism in a given culture. The more a society prizes independence and personal success, the less support parents receive from those around them, and it is precisely that lack of support that proves crucial. This is an important pointer for Poland: since burnout is more strongly linked to culture than to the sheer number of hours spent with a child, solutions are worth seeking not only in how individual parents cope, but also in how the wider environment, neighbours, family, employers, treats the need for support in parenting.

Where burnout leads when nobody notices it

Untreated parental burnout is associated with symptoms resembling depression, chronic stress and tension, increased conflict and aggression, both towards a partner and towards a child, disorganisation, sleep problems, lower self-esteem and life satisfaction, and, in extreme cases, thoughts of abandoning the family. You can assess your own level of burnout using the Parental Burnout Assessment questionnaire, available in validated versions for many languages.

The pandemic, and the school closures and remote work that came with it, placed extra strain on parents worldwide, cutting off access to exactly those external resources, grandparents' support, institutional childcare or simply a break from a child, that normally allow strength to be rebuilt. The Roskam and Mikolajczak team continued its research through this period too, confirming that a sudden loss of available resources translates directly into higher burnout levels, regardless of country.

How resources are rebuilt

Parental burnout is above all the result of demands outweighing the resources, psychological, skill-based, financial, relational, that a given parent has available. Rebuilding those resources is chiefly systemic work: greater involvement from a partner and family, psychological support, building parenting skills, and cutting back on toxic, perfectionist patterns of parenting. No substance can replace that. In practice, this often means very concrete, small changes: regular time, even if brief, just for yourself, a clear division of household duties between partners, and an open conversation with those close to you about what support you actually need, rather than waiting for someone to guess.

Where kava fits into all this

Kava will not rebuild a parent's resources and cannot replace support from loved ones or therapy, but it may have some role in easing part of the symptom picture that goes with burnout. Kavalactones, in laboratory studies, potentiate GABA A receptors, which is linked to calming an overactivated nervous system, and it is precisely chronic irritability and lack of patience that are named as one of the main symptoms of parental emotional exhaustion. You can read more about how kava affects sleep, often one of the first things to suffer for burned-out parents, in the article on kava and sleep research, and about its effect on cortisol levels in the piece cortisol and kava.

Kava is also sometimes mentioned as an alternative to alcohol, which some burned-out parents reach for as a quick escape, something we cover in the article kava instead of alcohol. This is not, however, a matter of swapping one dependency for another: kava, like alcohol, acts on the central nervous system and interacts with medicines broken down in the liver, including some antidepressants and sedatives, so combining it with alcohol or with prescription medicines requires a conversation with a doctor beforehand, rather than the assumption that because it is a plant, nothing bad can happen.