The affective dynamics of parenting: Inertia of emotional distance characterizes severe parental burnout

Our emotional trajectories make up our affective experience—but these can be disrupted during mental illness. This study focuses on affect anchored to the parenting context (i.e., daily emotional exhaustion, emotional distance from children, and feeling fed up) to assess whether the way parenting affect fluctuates relates to dysfunction: parental burnout severity. We focus on three specific patterns (i.e., affective dynamic indices): inertia (i.e., persistence across days), variation (i.e., magnitude of change), and covariation (i.e., whether affect variables fluctuate together). We reanalyzed multiple datasets (from Belgium and the U.S.) yielding 180 parents who had rated their parenting affect daily for either three or eight weeks. We computed a regression model with all affective indices as predictors (controlling for mean levels), with parental burnout severity as the outcome variable. Results indicate that inertia of emotional distance predicts parental burnout severity across most sensitivity models (i.e., even with varied operationalizations of affective indices). No other temporal pattern (i.e., variation or covariation) robustly predicted parental burnout severity, although the mean levels of emotional distance and emotional exhaustion did. Results from sensitivity analyses emphasize that operationalization choices for affective indices can yield varying values and impact results.