When parenting culture exhausts parents: Good-parent beliefs and parental burnout across 35 countries
(2021) Society for Research in Child Development (SRCD) 2021 Biennial Meeting — Location: In virtual (7.April.2021)
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- Authors
Lin, Gao-Xian 
- Abstract
- Parenting is one of the most flourishing topics in the field of Developmental Psychology. And for a good reason, parenting is the very foundation of the survival of the human species. Yet, after decades of research, there are still two main shortcomings in the current parenting research. Firstly, despite several pioneering research (e.g., Keller et al., 2006; Super & Harkness, 1986), 90% of the parenting studies focus merely on the US parents—how human is parented outside of the US remains largely unknown (see Mistry & Dutta, 2015). Moreover, even the research conducted in the US, most of them were mainly concerned with delineating “good” parenting as the way to promote child development; on the contrary, little or no attention has been paid to “good” parenting as the way to promote parents’ well-being. Evidenced in recent studies (e.g., Lin et al., 2020), one consequence of its ignorance is that some “good” parenting strategies may bolster the well-being of children coming at the expense of that of parents: parents may suffer from parental burnout—a parenting context-specific syndrome with very damaging consequences for both parents and children. The present communication aims to bridge these shortcomings by exploring “good” parenting from the perspective of the mothers’ and fathers’ good-parent beliefs from 35 countries. In particular, our research examines two questions: (1) What are parenting cultures (i.e., the good-parent beliefs shared within a specific culture) worldwide? (2) What is the association between parenting culture and parental burnout? We used the data of 9,673 mothers and 3,994 fathers from 35 countries spanning five continents, which was collected through the 2018-2019 International Investigation of Parental Burnout (IIPB) Consortium. Leximancer Semantic Network Analysis (Smith & Humphreys, 2006) was performed on both the score of parental burnout assessed by Parental Burnout Assessment (Roskam et al., 2018) and five open-ended features parents personally considered that a good parent should ideally possess. Results revealed that there exist at least six types of parenting cultures across 35 countries. Although there were some culture-common features between cultures, culture-specific features of good-parent beliefs exist. Secondly, the association of good-parent beliefs with parental burnout was differential across cultures as well as between fathers and mothers. The findings suggested that “parenting culture” is indeed plural rather than singular, and that there may be neither single nor universal connection between parenting culture and parental burnout.
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Citations
Lin, G.-X., Mikolajczak, M., & Roskam, I. (2021). When parenting culture exhausts parents: Good-parent beliefs and parental burnout across 35 countries. Society for Research in Child Development (SRCD) 2021 Biennial Meeting, In virtual. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/106185