A Temporal Network Approach to Parental Burnout
(2022) 17th European Congress of Psychology — Location: Ljubljana, Slovenia (5.July.2022)
Files
No attached file found for this publication.
Details
- Authors
Blanchard, Annelise 
Hoebeke, Yorgo
- Abstract
- ome parents are exhausted and fed up with parenting, feeling emotionally distant from their children and like they are no longer the enthusiastic parent they were before. Researchers have termed this phenomenon parental burnout, and propose that it arises when parents have insufficient parenting resources (e.g., supportive spouse, emotion regulation strategies) to compensate for their parental stressors (e.g., difficult family dynamics, no social support). Parental burnout has mainly been investigated from a cross-sectional perspective, but the experience of parenting and its family context change frequently – how then do these variables fluctuate and interact daily? We recruited an unselected sample of 47 parents who answered 11 items (about parental burnout features, relationship with the partner and children, and the family context) daily over eight weeks. We used multilevel vector-autoregressive models to generate three networks, and preregistered the analysis and data collection methods (https://osf-io.proxy.bib.ucl.ac.be:2443/zumev/). From one day to the next (e.g., the temporal network), few variables predicted parental burnout features. First, sharing positive moments with children predicted feeling less distant from the children the next day. In addition, a feedback loop appeared: emotional exhaustion predicted children’s behavior (finding children “difficult to manage”), which then predicted feeling fed up, which in turn predicted exhaustion again. In terms of the family context, decreased social support predicted greater partner support the next day, which in turn predicted feeling less distant. On average, when collapsing across time (e.g., the between-subjects network), parents with increased social support also showed less negative behavior toward children; in addition, negative behavior toward children was associated with greater partner conflict, which in turn was related to greater social support. These results provide an initial glimpse at the temporal dynamics of parental burnout and the family system, highlighting the importance of examining parental burnout within its context: the family environment.
- Affiliations
Citations
Blanchard, A., Hoebeke, Y., & Heeren, A. (2022). A Temporal Network Approach to Parental Burnout. 17th European Congress of Psychology, Ljubljana, Slovenia. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/105623