Research

More lonely and more exhausted: pioneering study reveals that Western countries are the most affected by parental burnout

Western countries, especially the richer ones and where there is a more individualistic culture, are the most affected by parental burnout. This is the conclusion of an unprecedented international study involving over a hundred scientists from 42 countries, including Portugal.

Led by researchers Isabelle Roskam and Moïra Mikolajczak, from the Catholic University of Louvain, in Belgium, in Portugal the study is coordinated by Anne Marie Fontaine, professor at the University of Porto (UP), and Maria Filomena Gaspar, professor at the University of Coimbra (UC) and researcher at the Centre for Social Studies (CES).

The main focus of this pioneering international research was to understand if the incidence of parental burnout depends on the cultural context of the country where it develops, reflecting the concern of the scientific community with stress-induced burnout associated to the care of children and adolescents - parental burnout - a condition that brings serious consequences to both adult caregivers and children.

Prevalence of parental burnout in different countries | Source: Roskam et al. (2021), Affective Science, 2, 58-79.

The results of the study, already published in the scientific journal Affective Science, in the article "Parental Burnout Around the Globe: a 42-Country Study", show that culture, more than socioeconomic factors, plays a crucial role in the incidence of burnout in fathers and mothers, in other words, the conclusions leave no room for doubt: in richer Western countries and where there is a more individualistic culture, families on average have fewer children and are more affected by the phenomenon.

This means that individualistic values in Western countries may subject caregivers to higher levels of stress. «This finding leads us to rethink the saying of ‘we all fend for ourselves’, which is spreading around the world», says Isabelle Roskam.

On her part, Anne Marie Fontaine notes that «in individualistic countries, there is a cult of performance and perfectionism, and this has also been extended to the exercise of the parental role».

«Parenting in these countries can be a very solitary activity, unlike what occurs in more collectivist cultures, as is the case in the countries of Africa, where there is a greater involvement of the whole community in the education of children», stresses Maria Filomena Gaspar. Furthermore, she adds, «individualism has been aggravated by the current pandemic situation, in which nuclear families are more isolated from their usual support networks».

Considering the current health crisis, the Portuguese team also developed a study in which it was possible to verify an increase in parental exhaustion during restrictive confinement measures. «Comparing the levels of stress perceived by fathers and mothers in the periods before and during the pandemic, there was an increase for both caregivers. However, it is interesting to highlight that this increase in exhaustion was more pronounced in fathers than in mothers», says Joyce Aguiar, one of the authors of the study.

«Knowing that Portugal is a country where women are the main caregivers of children, this greater propensity of men to parental burnout is due not to the volume of parental tasks that in fact they have assumed during the pandemic, but to the lack of emotional resources to deal with the pressures of caring for children in the current and challenging conditions - in confinement, without support from the extended family, with distance learning and remote working, for example», she clarifies.

However, Maria Filomena Gaspar also mentions, «it should be noted that there were also fathers and mothers in Portugal who experienced the confinement as an opportunity to reduce parental burnout, with, respectively, 18.7% of men and 26.6% of women reporting this improvement».

«It is essential that clinical psychologists and other health professionals know about parental burnout so that they can recognise its symptoms when they eventually come across mothers and fathers in this condition, which can easily be confused with depression. To assist in the diagnosis, we made a Portuguese adaptation of the Parental Burnout Assessment, published in the New Directions for Child and Adolescent Development», concludes Marisa Matias, member of the team and who worked together with researchers from Brazil, in order to ensure that the instrument was adapted to both European and Brazilian Portuguese.

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Author: Cristina Pinto | Press Office - University of Coimbra • Rectory | Science Communication