Parental burnout: at the end of their tether

When Judith comes home after a long day at work, she immediately puts six-year-old Theo in the bathtub and starts cooking. Her mum is visiting today and is going to have dinner with them. Fifteen minutes later, the 37-year-old mum asks her son to come out of the bath and put on his pyjamas. But he refuses. She gives him another five minutes, but even then he doesn't want to.

She tries to convince him. She understands that he wants to continue bathing, but it is already late, dinner is almost ready and if he stays up late, he will be tired the next morning. It's no use. On the contrary, Theo is now also annoyed and reproaches her: «You never give me time to play in the bath!» Judith is annoyed and gets loud. In the end, she pulls her son out of the water by force.

Theo starts to cry and her mum comments: «In my day, there would never have been anything like this. Children still obeyed then!» Judith feels like a failure. She sleeps badly, torments herself with self-doubt and feelings of guilt. Why can't she assert herself? Why do the children make it so difficult for her?

Her teenage daughter only does what she wants anyway, and since her husband has been travelling abroad a lot for work, Theo also has to assert his stubbornness. She often doesn't know what to do in everyday life. She feels exhausted and empty.

More and more often she wishes to be somewhere else, to leave everything behind. She no longer enjoys looking after her children. Is Judith suffering from burnout?

Fathers and mothers of children who are already 30 can also suffer from parental burnout.

Psychologists first used the term burnout in the late 1960s to describe the consequences of chronic stress at work. Research showed that it mainly affected people who cared for others at work, for example in the care of the elderly and sick.

Typical characteristics were exhaustion, indifference, low performance and a decline in identification with work. It usually hit those who had previously been the most committed.

In the 1980s, some scientists considered for the first time that parents can also suffer from burnout. However, they initially only investigated mothers and fathers of chronically ill children and largely ignored the general public.

We researchers from the Psychological Sciences Research Institute of the Université Catholique de Louvain in Belgium want to close this gap with our work.

We have been supporting 3000 parents since 2011. During this time, we realised that the characteristic symptoms of burnout can occur in all types of families. Not only the illness of a child is a risk factor, but also a lack of skills to deal with stress, separation from a partner and a lack of friends to confide in.

According to our latest surveys, five per cent of mothers and fathers in France suffer from parental burnout, and a further eight per cent are at an increased risk of developing it in the following year. In other words, 13 per cent are tormented by their parenthood.

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Take the self-test here and find out whether you are suffering from parental burnout or are close to it. You can download the test as a PDF and print it out.

This has nothing to do with the so-called baby blues: it is caused by hormonal fluctuations in the first few days after birth. Burnout syndrome can set in regardless of how old the children are; parents of teenagers can also be affected and even those whose offspring are already 30 years old, as our survey shows. It differs from depression in that the listlessness only affects family life and the upbringing of children.

What are the symptoms of parental burnout?

As with job burnout, there are typically three symptoms. First comes exhaustion: those affected feel empty, at the end of their tether. Next comes emotional detachment. There is a lack of energy to engage in the relationship with the child. You are less attentive and no longer attach as much importance to what the child is experiencing and feeling.

And then - possibly even before or at the same time - your ability to perform and identify with your role as a parent dwindles. You are no longer absorbed in it and no longer feel like a good father or mother.

Two of these three symptoms are enough to speak of burnout. The role that chronic stress plays in this is controversial. Even if being a parent is often wonderful, it can certainly be a burden. Parents have to organise family life, manage everyday life, put their own activities on the back burner in favour of their offspring - but this is not equally stressful for everyone and at all times.

Acute stress is when there is a clear, temporary trigger, for example a short-term illness of the child. It becomes chronic when the situation persists or one acute stress follows the next, without any breaks for recovery in between.

The normal madness

This was the case with Marie, for example. One of her two twin sons suffered a traumatic brain injury in a cycling accident. At the time, nobody knew whether he would suffer permanent damage. Three weeks after the accident, the brother of the victim was still very restless and suffered from nightmares every night - he also needed support. Marie visited her sick son in hospital every day after work. Her strength became increasingly exhausted.

However, there is not always a dramatic experience behind a burnout. Normal everyday life is sometimes challenging enough: parents want to do as much good as possible for their offspring; they should be healthy and happy and develop optimally.

There is not always a dramatic event behind a burnout: normal everyday life is challenging enough.

Nevertheless, every now and then you simply get too tired from work to be able to devote your full attention to your child. Then you don't have the time, inclination or patience to listen, praise or help. Instead, you quickly get annoyed or upset about little things, even though you actually wanted to promote autonomy and make considered judgements.

Sometimes you want to do something for yourself even though you haven't seen the children all day. It's a legitimate request, but the feelings of guilt come up.

The idealised image of the family and its consequences - too much commitment, perfectionism - contribute significantly to parental burnout. For example, a couple who work full-time and still want to provide three children with organic food every day and take them to sports, music lessons or theatre groups.

Once the burnout has set in, other problems follow: «If I just wanted to spend a moment with the baby, my eldest was constantly demanding attention. I was incredibly annoyed and had to pull myself together all the time,» says Elisabeth, who is a mum of two. «When my husband came home, I exploded. I'd rather take everything out on him than on the children.» Marital problems and arguments increase, and libido can also suffer from burnout.

Some of those affected neglect their children, no longer wash them, don't take enough care of them or forget to make them something to eat. Some even swear at them or hit them. We are not currently aware of any study that has proven that burnout is necessarily associated with neglect, verbal or physical abuse. However, all of the people we interviewed told us about such behaviour.

Burnout intensifies addictions

Burnout syndrome can also promote addictions or intensify existing ones, as our data suggests. Caffeine, for example, helps those affected to persevere; pathological gambling or two or three glasses of wine per evening are supposed to distract them from their misery and relax them. Kirsi Ahola from the Finnish Institute of Occupational Medicine in Helsinki and her colleagues confirmed a link between addiction and occupational burnout syndrome back in 2006.

In a survey of more than 3,000 employees, the researchers showed that each additional point on a burnout scale increased the risk of alcohol dependence by 51 per cent in men and 80 per cent in women. We are currently investigating whether parents with burnout are more likely to take their own lives.

So far, all those affected have told us about suicidal thoughts, which also occur in the context of depression. Some parents say they wanted to «give up everything, disappear» so that they no longer had to look after their children. In other areas of life, however, they felt good. The suffering also has an impact on health. Chronic stress can affect the immune system, heart and stomach.

This certainly applies to professional burnout: Danielle Mohren and her colleagues from Maastricht University used data from 12,000 employees to establish that burnout also leads to more frequent viral infections, doubling the likelihood of contracting gastroenteritis.

And the risk of cardiovascular disease increased by 80 per cent, as a team led by Sharon Toker from Tel Aviv University showed. The researchers tracked the health of around 8,800 working people in Israel over a period of three years.

Breaking taboos, talking about it

The first thing to look out for is the first signs: whether you feel exhausted or empty; whether you lose the desire to engage with your children in everyday life; whether you find it difficult to listen to them; whether you feel distant from them inside; whether you get annoyed too quickly, overreact or, on the contrary, remain indifferent.

If many of these points apply, those affected should consider burnout (see self-test for download). A number of things then need to be changed. Above all, it is important to talk about it. Suffering from being a parent is taboo.

Nevertheless, mums and dads who are struggling should seek help from a doctor or psychologist. Although medication cannot simply eliminate the problems, it may have a supportive effect if the burnout is very advanced or the person affected is thinking about suicide.

However, most of the work is psychological in nature. The aim is to find out how things got this far and which stresses are particularly serious. This can vary from case to case. Our experience shows that certain factors often play a role: the quality of the partnership, parenting practices, the personalities of those affected. They are often perfectionists, but find it difficult to deal with their own emotions and to recognise and understand their children's feelings.

What can help with parental burnout

For example, they are unable to categorise whether a tantrum reflects genuine suffering or whether the child lacks clear boundaries. However, these are important parental skills. It is also important to recognise stress at an early stage and prevent it, for example by optimising everyday life.

Some affected parents say they want to disappear so that they no longer have to look after their children.

It can help to get support from grandparents, divide tasks more clearly, reduce leisure activities to a reasonable level, get food from the freezer if necessary or order the pizza courier - in short: to be less strict with yourself from time to time. The mothers and fathers affected often lack concrete help from their partners, due to their work or a traditional understanding of their roles.

There is just as often a lack of emotional support: the parents do not form a team and contradict each other on parenting issues. This is not only difficult for the parents themselves, but also for the child.

Family therapists can help the couple to find a common line and contradictions and inconsistent behaviour cannot always be avoided. If a parent threatens to abandon the child at the side of the road on a car journey if it is not well-behaved, this threat should of course not be carried out. But anyone who repeatedly threatens consequences and doesn't carry them out makes themselves untrustworthy.

In this way, the child learns that it does not have to attach any importance to what the parents say. Last but not least, it's about spending quality time together. This does not mean that parents or children should force themselves to do something that they do not actually enjoy. Rather, the family should look for activities that are fun for everyone involved.

Contrary to expectations, the likelihood of suffering burnout as a mother or father does not depend on the age of the children, the age of the parents or their income.

And these do not always have to be educationally valuable. Contrary to expectations, the likelihood of suffering burnout as a mum or dad does not depend on the age of the children, the age of the parents or their income.

Patchwork parents do not suffer from it more often or less often either. And even a difficult, stubborn child alone is not enough to trigger burnout. However, this also means that no parent is fundamentally immune.

Anyone suffering from burnout should not give up hope. It may seem difficult to get out of a slump when you have no strength left for anything. But burnout doesn't last a lifetime. Sometimes it lasts two weeks, sometimes four months or two years. But once you've overcome it, you regain your strength and can enjoy the pleasures of parenthood again.