Children’s Experiences of Parental Burnout

• In Event: 3-078 - Parental Burnout and its Consequences Against Children

Integrative Statement

There has been little research on the impact of parental burnout on children so far. Previous studies have only highlighted the risk of negligence and violence (Hubert & Aujoulat, 2018; Mikolajczak, et al., 2018) and they were only based on parents’ report. The purpose of our qualitative study was to understand how the children themselves experience living with a parent who burns out.
Three mothers who scored high in the Parental Burnout inventory (> 88; PBI; Roskam, et al., 2017) and five of their children, aged from 7 to 10, were interviewed. Pictures and the Family Systems Test (FAST; Gehring, 1986) were also used to collect data with the children. Mothers’ and children’s interview transcripts were analyzed using interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA; Smith, et al., 1999) and compared to each other.
Four themes emerged from the mothers’ interviews: inadequate parenting practices, disturbed children, self-centered mothers, and secrecy. All the mothers admitted using inconsistent, punitive discipline with their offspring. Two of them confessed to having beaten or bitten them. They had also all noticed a change in their children’s behavior within the three months of their burnout. Four in five children had started displaying internalizing disorders: sleep problems, secondary encopresis or enuresis, and psychosomatic symptoms (headaches, abdominal pain). Three of them had also turned clingy, asking for constant comforting. The analysis also reveals that these mothers are so self-centered, that they are unable to assess or respond to their children’s needs. They underestimate or deny their children’s difficulties and rarely link them to their own condition. Finally, the explanations they give about their burnout are unclear and guilt-inducing.
Furthermore, the analysis of the children’s transcripts unveiled four emergent themes: the perception of the mother’s burnout, a confused maternal syndrome, fear, and guilt. All the children had noticed the symptoms of parental burnout: fatigue, irritability, and particularly emotional distance. However, they suffered from a lack of knowledge about their mothers’ burnout. In some children, the imagination had filled the gaps with a tendency to catastrophization. Most children also reported a feeling of insecurity. They were scared of losing their mother’s love and being abandoned. Their mothers were no longer perceived as a secure base. Finally, all of them expressed a feeling of guilt which fueled parentification and a lower self-esteem.
Our results share many similarities with those of qualitative studies on children living with mentally-ill parents (Mordoch, 2010; Trondsen, 2012). The children we interviewed feel the same painful emotions of sadness, fear, and guilt and enter into similar processes of depreciation and parentification. They also suffer, like them, from lack of information about the disease.
Moreover, in our study, the comparison of the two analyzes shows a hiatus. On the one hand, the mothers doubt that their children have noticed their symptoms. On the other hand, the children have perfectly perceived their mother's burnout and they feel responsible for it. This hiatus is explained by the lack of communication between the mothers and their children about burnout.

Author

• Laure du Pouget de Nadaillac, Middlesex University London
  Presenting Author