The slippery slope of parental exhaustion: A process model of parental burnout

The goal of this research was to investigate the developmental process of parental burnout by testing whether there were systematic prospective relations between the dimensions of parental burnout as measured with the Parental Burnout Inventory (PBI). We investigated this question in two cross-lagged three-wave longitudinal studies with French- and English-speaking parents (N1 = 918, 78.8% mothers, Mage_mothers = 39.38, Mage_fathers = 43.02; N2 = 822, 59.2% mothers, Mage_mothers = 38.68, Mage_fathers = 38.02). High levels of exhaustion were found to predict increases in emotional distancing and feelings of inefficacy, which then mutually reinforce. Since emotional distancing elicits the most damaging consequences of parental burnout for children (i.e., parental neglect and violence), the current study suggests that prevention efforts will be most beneficial in the exhaustion phase of parental burnout.