Parental burnout is most prevalent in Western countries characterized by high individualism. The gap between parenting ideals and realities and children socialised to put own desires first are key burnout drivers. In the past, children were more independent in public and less demanding at home.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/au/blog/the-art-of-self-improvement/202409/do-you-suffer-from-parental-burnout
10 Comments
I’ve linked to the news release in the post above. In this comment, for those interested, here’s the link to the peer reviewed journal article:
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00127-023-02487-z
From the linked article:
KEY POINTS
– Parenting highly individualistic children is correlated with higher burnout risk.
– Gentle, mindful, positive and conscious parenting take a heavy toll on parental energy levels.
– In the past, children were much more independent in public and less demanding at home.
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.[i] 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 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.” In other words, they will be headstrong handfuls. Parenting highly individualistic children involves accepting decreased 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.
So, we are teaching our children how to burn us out!
Single parenting an autistic teenager so I feel this one.
The fact that you can’t stop them from chopping of parts of their body or greatly altering it with chemicals. Already says alot. But they can’t have a tattoo.
I’d be willing to bet one outcome not addressed in this study is learning challenges for these kids of burned out parents. When kids set the pace and and priority, you end up ping ponging from on thing to another, they have very little attention span for anything except video games or TV.
It has a lot to do with empathy towards our children in todays time. We care more about the wellbeing of our children compared to previous generations.
Also, we have much more knowledge about parenting and children. Parenting in todays society is way more complex compared to 25 years ago.
Really interesting but we will we learn from this? I don’t see it. Look at Japan where they have struggled with these type of issues for a couple of generations now. Hikkomori etc… Parenting is hard but are we hard enough?
Something missing from the study.
It wasn’t that long ago where families had like 5 kids. Therefore, most of the time while the father and mother worked and did house chores, the older siblings would babysit the younger siblings. This gave parents a lot more free time to det things done as apposed to now where families are now down to 1-2 kids. Not to mention grandparents were also obligated to help but with people moving around the country a lot more the grandparents might also not be around.
Yep I noticed that is why society is failing. Too many chiefs and not enough Indians.
Of course, when children are only at home for meals and sleeping, and otherwise at school or out playing, they are much less demanding.
Life hack: Whenever you see your child, ask them for some help with a chore. You will basically never hear the “I am bored” complaint.