Several years ago, World Health Organization identified burnout as one of the nowadays afflictions. And parental responsibility in raising children is one of the potential causes.
What is parental burnout?
One simple Google search of “parenting” generates 269,000,000 results. Theories, surveys, different points of view on how to raise children so that they:
- would become emotional fulfilled adults,
- benefit of the best physical development,
- reach their intellectual potential
- successfully integrate into society,
and so on.
50 years ago, “parenting” was limited to fulfilling children’s basic needs. Such as feeding, providing clean cloths and learning the norms of proper behavior. But, currently, the social pressure, sensed by parents, especially mothers, is almost overwhelming.
Mothers try to gather as much information as possible and to use the best educational methods in taking care of their little ones. And they tend to neglect themselves. An attitude that is neither beneficial for themselves, nor for the functionality of the entire family.
Moïra Mikolajczak, professor from the Louvain University in Belgium, defines parental burnout as “the parents’ feeling of exhaustion, the emotional distancing from children and the feeling of inefficiency in performing parental duties.”
Who is prone to parental burnout?
Dr. Amy Imms, founder of The Burnout Project and author of “The first 10 steps to burnout” says that
- “single parents,
- parents of children with special needs,
- those with history of mental disorders,
- but also those structurally inclined towards perfectionism ”
are in the higher risk categories.
There is a research published in 2018 – “The pressure to be the perfect mother, parental burnout and career ambitions”. The authors, Loes Meeussen and Colette Van Laar prove that there is a continuous social pressure on women to provide their offspring the best care. At the same time, they are trying to reach their professional goals. In an unwritten hierarchy of social norms that women currently adhere to, personal success is defined first by the parental achievements. Women who want to be financially independent from their partners must prove that they are even more capable as a parents, in order to be socially accepted. And this constant effort can lead to burnout and, ironically, it has a negative outcome on the relationship with the children.
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