Parental burnout and decreased sensitivity to context for mothers: A temporal network approach grounded in the family environment

Parental burnout, which includes emotional exhaustion, emotional distance, and feeling fed up with parenting, is a chronic and potentially debilitating stress condition that has become highly prevalent in Western countries. Yet uncertainty remains about parents’ daily experience of burnout and how their experiences interact with their family environment. In this study, we surveyed a sample of 40 parents (who felt overwhelmed and exhausted by parenting) daily for eight weeks about their experiences of parental burnout, interactions with their children, and family environment, yielding 1541 total observations; main analyses focus on 36 mothers. We estimated a multilevel vector autoregressive model and created three distinct graphical networks to best reveal the dynamics of these interactions. All models point to interactions with children as a key determinant in the parent’s daily experience of parental burnout—particularly predicting emotional distance and feeling fed up. At the temporal level, parental burnout symptoms were characterized by strong self-prediction (autoregression). In addition, the severity of parental burnout was negatively correlated with daily variation of parental burnout features. Together, these results suggest that mothers in a severe state of burnout are less sensitive to their context, with the exception of interactions with their children.