These are the real reasons why parents are so exhausted
Anna Katharina Schaffner | Psychology Today
A shorter version of this article was originally published on 10 September 2024 on Psychology Today/The Art of Self-Improvement
Strictly speaking, burnout is defined as a state of chronic exhaustion that is caused by chronic stress at work. However, many things now feel like work, including our relationships, our health and fitness, our inner development, and our parenting. Some of us blame work for our exhaustion, some our personality traits, self-talk, and unhelpful beliefs, and some the state of the world or our domestic situations. What is more, exhaustion rarely has a single cause, but we tend to rank or stressors and construct our exhaustion narratives accordingly.
In 2015, the psychologists Isabelle Roskam and Moira Mikolajczak introduced the notion of ‘parental burnout’. The concept spread rapidly, clearly resonating with parents across the world. There is now a large community of researchers who are investigating parental burnout. Roskam and Mikolajczak define parental burnout as a state of chronic exhaustion that is related to our parenting role. It can result in guilt and shame, emotional distancing from our children, fantasies of escaping, and feelings of being fed up with or regretting our parenting role. Regardless of its causes, burnout is always generated by an imbalance between demand and resources. It emerges in the gap between reality and ideal, and in this case, the gap between how we want to, used to, or feel we should show up as parents and how we actually parent.
Risk factors contributing to parental burnout include unsustainably high parenting ideals, parental perfectionism, lack of family and other support networks, unsupportive partners, and unfair distributions of parenting and household chores. Parental burnout matters not just because it negatively affects parents, but it obviously it also impacts children. In extreme cases, it can result in child neglect and maltreatment.
Interestingly, parental burnout risk factors also include typical individualistic parenting goals and ideals. In a large-scale global study, Roskam et al. (2024) have shown that parental burnout is most prevalent in Western countries characterized by high individualism.[1] They looked at discrepancies between socially prescribed and actual parental selves, high agency and self-directed socialization goals, and low parental task sharing. Highly individualistic people are understood to be characterized by “autonomy and independence, individual achievement and responsibility, self-reliance, lack of concern for others, motivation for their own needs, goals and preferences, competition, self-direction, stimulation, power, hedonism, and perfectionism.” (Roskam et al. 2024, p. 682) I found this to be a rather depressing definition. It makes us sound like selfish, advantage- and pleasure-seeking animals, with very limited capacity for altruism or other pro-social behaviours. Like a humourlessly ambitious crossbreed combining the worst qualities of sharks and cats.
The study established that the gap between parenting ideals and realities, lack of social support, and children socialised to put their own desires and preferences first are indeed key burnout drivers. Children tend to be socialized to comply with the dominant values of their cultures, which in our case include independence, confidence, assertiveness, self-direction, and a striving for power, agency, and control. Children thus primed will be “more self-oriented, more demanding, and less inclined to comply with their parents’ wishes” (p. 682). In other words, they will be a headstrong handful. Parenting highly individualistic children involves accepting decreased parental authority and guidance and constant negotiation, compromise, and a need to justify ourselves. Unsurprisingly, this kind of parenting is also extremely time and emotional-labour intensive. And if things go wrong and we develop these qualities too far, our children may even become entitled and narcissistic.
How Did We Get Here? Insights from the History of Parenting
As always, it is instructive to reflect on how we got here and to look at how parenting styles have evolved over time. The ancients and pre-moderns don’t seem to have been particularly interested in children. They thought them to be hot-tempered, sinful, and instinct-driven creatures, or else just less competent mini-adults. Until the modern period, childhood was not considered a time of sanctuary during which children should be protected and guarded from the harsh realities of life and the necessity to be economically productive. The notion of childhood as a sacred, volatile, and distinct developmental stage was first articulated by the Enlightenment thinkers John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Childhood was properly cherished by the Romantics, who celebrated children’s imagination, innocence, and purity. As a consequence of industrialization, secularization, and urbanization, the nineteenth century saw the emergence of the nuclear family and more familiar notions of childhood.[2]
In the past, child-rearing goals centred on securing salvation, economic contribution, and creating good community members that served the family, state, and church. Gradually, parenting goals shifted to fostering uniqueness, nurturing the imagination and cognitive and sentimental development, and protecting the sanctity of childhood. The sociologist Viviana A. Zelizer (1985) has described this shift as a move from children becoming “economically useless but emotionally priceless”.[3]
It is fair to say that from the beginning of the 20th Century onwards, we have seen a transition away from authoritarian towards more authoritative, permissive, warm, and empathetic parenting models, although authoritarian models re-surface periodically. The twentieth century is of course also the age of psychology, and parenting trends responded to the emergence of psychological knowledge. Amongst many other things, Freud introduced the idea of the pivotal role parents play in the psycho-sexual and -social development of their children. He shone an unforgiving light on the myriads of things that can go wrong in our early years, and the lasting damage that traumas and microtraumas can cause, including intergenerational ones.
In addition to depth psychology, we also saw the rise of behaviourism, which advocated reward and punishment strategies, rigorous routines, and a hard-nosed don’t kiss, don’t touch, don’t show affection kind of parenting. Permissive, gentle, and empathic parenting became popular in the 1960s, partly thanks to Dr Benjamin Spock’s hugely influential parenting book from 1946, and partly because of a more general anti-authoritarian cultural climate. In the 1980s and 1990s, we saw a return of more authoritarian parenting styles, perhaps because more and more women entered the work-force and had to find more pragmatic and less time-intensive ways to parent to achieve a manageable work-life balance.[5]
Thanks to the rise of Positive Psychology and mindfulness, as well as to increased knowledge of developmental psychology and the neuroscience of parenting, which have clearly shown the damaging effects of authoritarian and neglectful parenting, our current parenting trends are firmly on the compassionate, permissive, and authoritative side of the spectrum. We know how important secure attachment is and also value mental wellbeing, emotional literacy, and social skills as highly as never before in history. Most experts also agree that total laissez-faire-style parenting is not ideal either, and that high compassion and empathy should ideally be paired up with reasonable boundaries.
Current parenting styles include positive parenting, positive discipline, conscious parenting, gentle parenting, mindful parenting, and free-range parenting. In less positive terms, we also talk about helicopter-, performance-, and snow-plough parenting. The social psychologist Jonathan Haidt has introduced the notions of “safetyism” and “fearful parenting”.
Shifting Patterns and High-Cost Parenting
The sociologist Markella Rutherford has shown some other trends that explain why we may feel so energy- and time-poor as parents: Analyzing parenting advice from the early 20th Century into the early 21st Century, she has found that children’s public autonomy has declined greatly across that period. In the 60s and 70s, children used to walk or cycle alone to school, roamed and played alone or in tribes in neighborhoods and nature, and ran meaningful errands for their parents.[6] Nowadays, most of us drive our children everywhere, including to school.
Whilst our kids’ freedom to roam in public has massively decreased, their freedom to call the shots at home has massively increased: they decide what to wear, eat (beige food anyone?), how to talk, how to spend their time, and with whom. In the past, children were expected to do chores and help with household management, and later to earn their own pocket money with small jobs such as newspaper delivery and babysitting and lawn mowing. Nowadays, parents do most of the chores and also chauffeur their children around, from one extracurricular activity, playdate, or birthday party to another. Many mothers are also basically PAs for our kids, managing their increasingly complex social lives via WhatsApp and other channels. Many parents are also performance parenting – getting heavily involved in their children’s education, supervising homework, arts and crafts projects, music and sport practice, etc.
It is thus not surprising that William Davies confirms what our tired minds and bodies have been suggesting for a while: “Time-use studies have made the finding – perplexing, but only at first glance – that both men and women are spending both more hours a week ‘parenting’ and more hours doing paid work than was the case in the 1970s.”[7] Add to this our work- and time-crises about which I have written elsewhere, and the fact that contemporary parenting styles are the most time and emotional-labour intensive ones in history, and voila – a perfect storm scenario.
Science and Values
The driving force behind the compassionate turn in parenting styles, Sarah Ockwell-Smith writes, is “the development of science and the ability to prove the impact of care, via neurological imaging and ever more sophisticated psychological experiments.”[8] That is definitely true, but it is also true that parenting is always related to transmitting the values we cherish as a society more broadly. We want our kids to be able to adapt to, fit into, and succeed in a given historical moment by fostering the qualities and skills that are valued right now.
In the past, child rearing revolved around transmitting values such as godliness, the classical virtues, character strength, obedience, service, and duty. Nowadays, we cherish independence, imagination, originality, self-expression, authenticity, self-realization, perfectionism, emotional wellbeing, happiness, and fulfilment.[9] In other words, there is a clear shift from relational to individualist values. In yet other words, there is also a shift from pretty low-energy parenting styles to high labour and time-intensive parenting styles.
It is an obvious but nevertheless important point to make that parenting for obedience is a much less time and emotional-labour-intensive exercise than is parenting for independence, critical thinking, uniqueness, and imaginative attunement. In addition, parenting stakes have never been higher: because of what we know about depth and developmental psychology, we are now hyper-attuned to and fearful of the damage that our parenting can inadvertently cause. Social pressure on parenting is also higher than ever: parenting ideals and ideologies are bandied around on social media, TV, in women’s magazines, and of course in numerous parenting advice books. Our demand for this kind of advice has also risen because we no longer live in multi-generational households in which we can benefit from the advice of our elders.
A final point: most current parenting styles require high levels of mindfulness and emotional and impulse control. They require being in touch with our values, being present and empathetic at all times, engaging in active listening, patient negotiations, and constant calm justification of one’s views and methods. Conscious parenting, for example, is all about role-modelling desired behaviours, managing our triggers, understanding our own patterns so that we can break them and don’t pass them on, and seeing our children as teachers that can help us grow. That all sounds great, of course, but also… is it, maybe, just a touch exhausting and unrealistic? I want all that, for myself and my daughter, but I’m so not there. And nor is anybody else I know, for that matter. Most of us are ordinary human beings with ordinary human failings, not super-Yogis or Zen monks who operate on a higher spiritual plane.
‘Good Enough’ Parenting
Whatever we understand the main cause of our exhaustion and burnout to be, it is a truth universally acknowledged that burnout grows in the gap between our ideals and our lived experience. When our desired state and our actual state converge ever further, and when musts, shoulds, and coulds dominate in our inner monologues, and we find ourselves constantly falling foul of these, we begin to experience shame and guilt. Shame and guilt are in fact some of the most powerful drivers of burnout of all kinds – whether it is work- or parenting-related doesn’t matter.
I therefore want to conclude by say this: our parenting ideals have never been higher, more high-stakes, more time- and emotional-labour intensive, and more socially pressurized than they are right now. Combine this with the crisis of work, and our general sense of time-scarcity and overwhelm, and you have a toxic cocktail. Be thus exceedingly gentle with yourselves, and take what is treated as the general wisdom our times with a pinch of salt. The shifts and tendencies I outlined above are of course all largely positive and largely desirable, and we should not glorify or aim to return to bygone, outdated, and damaging forms of parenting. I simply long for a reactivation of slightly more sensible and more pragmatic parenting ideals, such as Donald Winnicott’s “good enough” parenting advice.
[1] Isabelle Roskam et al. “Three reasons why parental burnout is more prevalent in individualistic countries: A mediation study in 36 countries.” Social psychiatry and psychiatric epidemiology, 59:4 (2024): 681-694.
[2] Lauro Amezcua-Patino, “Nurturing Through Time: The History and Evolution of Parenting,” 28 November 2023, Raising a Beautiful Mind/Medium. Online at: https://medium.com/raising-a-beautiful-mind/nurturing-through-time-the-history-and-evolution-of-parenting-224cd17a3eb8.
[3] Viviana A. Zelizer, Pricing the Priceless Child: The Changing Social Value of Children (Princeton University Press, 1985).
[4] Diana Baumrind, “Current patterns of parental authority”, Developmental Psychology, 4(1:2) (1971), 1–103.
[5] Sarah Ockwell-Smith, “Changing Attitudes in parenting over the last 150 years,” 14 March 2019, JM Finn. Online at: https://www.jmfinn.com/our-thinking/changing-attitudes-parenting-over-last-150-years/.
[6] Markella Rutherford, Adult Supervision Required (Rutgers University Press, 2011), pp. 61-2.
[7] William Davies, “Anticipatory Anxiety: Generation Anxiety”, London Review of Books, 2024. Online at: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n12/william-davies/anticipatory-anxiety#.
[8] Sarah Ockwell-Smith, “Changing Attitudes in parenting over the last 150 years.”
[9] King’s College London (2023), ”Parenting Priorities: International Attitudes Towards raising Children”. Online at: https://www.kcl.ac.uk/policy-institute/assets/parenting-priorities.pdf.
Image: Vitolda Klein @Unsplash
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