Latent Profiles of Parenting Attitudes Predict Parents’ Burnout, Emotions, and Behaviors During COVID-19

• In Event: Poster Session 11
  In Poster Session: PS 11 Topic - Solicited Content: COVID-19 Related

Abstract

Parents are facing a range of new parenting stressors in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. Many parents are attempting to work remotely from home while also caring for their children who are home due to closures of schools and childcare facilities. Emerging research has shown that greater COVID-19 related stressors are associated with increased parenting stress (Chung, Lanier, & Ju, 2020). The accumulation of parenting stress may lead parents to experience overwhelming exhaustion, emotional distancing with children, and sense of ineffectiveness in their parenting role, that is, parental burnout. Previous research suggest that parental burnout is a multi-determined syndrome that is predicted by parents’ risk and resources, such as personality, and family functioning (Mikolajczak et al., 2017). However, these factors related to parental burnout have often been explored individually, and the mechanisms accounting for how different factors work together to predict parental burnout are unclear. This study uses a person-oriented approach to investigate different patterns of parents’ psychological traits and attitudes towards parenting and their relations with parental burnout. This study further examines the associations between different parental profiles and parenting emotions and behaviors during COVID-19 pandemic.

Data on parents’ experiences since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic was collected in April 2020. In this study, 998 parents (81.9% White, 82.9%) of children 0-12 years old (M=2.1 children, SD=1.0) were analyzed. Most parents reported annual income more than $50,000 per year (79%), but 20.4% of families lived at or below 200% of the federal poverty line. The survey included measures assessing parents’ ability to manage and regulate their emotions, resilience (perceived ability to bounce back or recover from stress), and endorsement of parenting perfectionism and intensive parenting attitudes (beliefs around child-centric and time intensive parenting). Parents also reported on increase in 6 emotions and 7 parenting behaviors when interacting with their children since the start of the pandemic (less than usual=1, the same as usual=2, more than usual=3).

A latent profile analysis using emotion regulation, parental resilience, parenting perfectionism, and intensive parenting attitudes revealed 3 parental profiles: 1)Low Resilience/High Parenting Perfectionism, 2)Moderate Parenting Perfectionism, and 3)High Resilience/Low Parenting Perfectionism. Parents in Low resilience/High Parenting Perfectionism profile reported significantly greater parental burnout compared to parents in other profiles [F(2, 995) =54.28, p<.001]. Ordinal regressions were conducted to examine the associations between profile membership and increase in parenting emotions and behaviors. Results indicated that parents in Low Resilience/High Parenting Perfectionism profile had about three-to four-fold greater odds of reporting increased negative emotions (i.e. worry and guilt) and more than two-fold greater odds of displaying increased negative parenting behaviors (i.e. yell, conflict, and ignore) since the start of the COVID-19 compared to the parents in High resilience/Low Parenting Perfectionism profile.

Together, the results highlight the heterogeneity of parents’ psychological traits and attitudes towards parenting. This study also demonstrates that parents characterized by low resilience and high parenting perfectionism are more susceptible to experiencing parental burnout and are more likely to report increased negative emotions and parenting behaviors during the COVID-19 crisis.

Authors

• Christina N Kim, NYU Grossman school of medicine
  Presenting Author

• Siri Nibhanupudi, University of Wisconsin - Madison
  Non-Presenting Author

• Margaret L. Kerr, University of Wisconsin - Madison
  Non-Presenting Author