You love your kids. Of course you do. But sometimes, just sometimes, there’s a fair chance they get on your nerves.
Now imagine having that feeling all the time — and multiply it ten-fold. This is an overwhelming, unshakeable irritation at every little thing your children do, compounded by deep-seated exhaustion and a bitter self-loathing that you aren’t acting like the parent you always dreamed you would be.
Psychologists now have a name for this: parental burnout.
The concept is gaining traction as parents struggle to balance increasingly busy professional lives with pressure to achieve a perfect family life.
Moira Mikolajczak and Isabelle Roskam, professors of psychology at the University of Louvain in Belgium, helped define the term after they and colleagues gathered evidence from 30,000 parents worldwide.
The term has been used sporadically in academic journals since the 1980s, but in the past was mainly used to describe parents of very sick children. Now it is gaining popularity among psychologists and counsellors as a more general phenomenon, after Mikolajczak and her team formalised the four stages of parental burnout.
The first stage is exhaustion. Mikolajczak said: “This is not just fatigue; that disappears after two or three good nights’ sleep. For these parents the mere thought of what you have to do with or for your children is already exhausting.”
Second comes emotional distancing. “It is a defence mechanism, to save the little energy you have yourself. You cannot distance yourself physically, you need to get them to and from school. So it’s an emotional distance.”
Third: loss of pleasure in parenting. “Parents tell us they still love their children, but they cannot always feel it. Parents often tell us they watch their kids sleeping at night so they can feel that love again. But when the kids are awake negative emotions dominate: irritation, impatience, stress.”
The final stage is shame. “Suddenly you’ve become this horrible parent who’s screaming at the kids, who is impatient, who’s stressed all the time, who’s shouting at the kids. You don’t recognise yourself; there is a difference between the parent that you are now and the parent you wanted to be.”
Burnout can strike both mothers and fathers; roughly two thirds of those the team have identified are women and a third men. Men suffer particularly badly because they often do not talk about the problem, even with their partners.
One study suggests roughly 9 per cent of parents in western countries suffer from burnout.
Mikolajczak, herself the mother of a ten-year-old daughter, said modern working conditions and an idealised vision of parenting were driving many parents to the end of their tether. Some even contemplate suicide, convinced they are such bad parents that their children would be better off without them.
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“There is currently a myth of the ‘perfect parent’,” said Mikolajczak. “We are all imperfect as human beings, so obviously we are imperfect as parents.”
Yet she and her team have discovered it is exactly those who strive for this ideal who are most likely to burn out. “It’s heartbreaking, because, just like those who burn out at work, only the people who are fully, deeply invested in their parenting suffer burnout.”
Anna Finch, 46, from Coventry, who has three children, admits she has many of the signs of burnout. “I actually dread the weekends. You know, most people look forward to them. But I have that sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach; I think, ‘Here we go again’.”
Anna Finch at home in Coventry. She is struggling to cope with the demands of raising three children and holding down a job
ANDREW FOX FOR THE SUNDAY TIMES
She added: “I’ve got a hormonal, moody, typical teenager, a five-year-old who is super bright, doing fantastic at school — but he still needs help getting dressed — and a one-year-old daughter who barely sleeps through the night.”
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Her husband works night shifts, and although he is a hands-on father — looking after the little girl when he gets home from work and doing the school run — she copes alone with their restless daughter at night.
She balances caring for her children with a job at the local council but gets little respite from either. After a disturbed night she has to pull herself into action. “I’ve got to get up and function and be this happy parent. I just have about enough energy to do the mundane tasks: the food, shopping and basic chores. And I barely do anything for enjoyment.”
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Alison Baker, the regional manager for the National Childbirth Trust’s Parents in Mind project in Coventry and Warwickshire, said pressures on parents were increasing, both financially and psychologically.
“The cost of living means it is harder, and there is more of a push for both parents to need to be working,” she said. “But the social pressure is also more intense. There is this idea, perpetuated on social media, that you should love every minute of parenthood, that you should cook beautiful homemade organic meals, and your children should be playing only with wooden toys. And you definitely, definitely shouldn’t be finding it hard to bring up your children.”
Parental burnout is harder to tackle than burnout in the workplace. You can switch jobs, after all, or take some time off but it is not so easy to get a break from your family.
While psychologists are increasingly aware of parental burnout — 2,500 professionals have been trained how to recognise and treat it in Europe over the past five years — many official health bodies are yet to recognise it. GPs are still more likely to diagnose depression than burnout, and while the World Health Organisation formally recognises “occupational” burnout in its international classification of diseases, it has no entry for parental burnout.
Mikolajczak, however, insisted that it was vital to recognise parental burnout as a distinct factor in order to overcome it.
The key to tackling the problem, Mikolajczak said, was to identify the factors that are causing stress and friction.
The early warning signs, according to the Action for Children charity, include increased irritation, a sense of isolation, and feeling like you need distance from your children, and exhaustion.
Going through your weekly routine, from start to finish, and identifying points of stress is a key part of the process. “Some stressors you cannot remove,” Mikolajczak said. “If you have a child with a disability, you cannot remove this disability. But some factors can be removed. For example, if your kids each have two extracurricular activities per week, maybe you can remove one.”
Seeking practical help is also advisable. “Car sharing for school, for example, or little things that will progressively alleviate the stress can help restore the balance. Not everything is possible. More support is not always affordable. But there are things you can do.”
Mikolajczak added: “It takes a little bit of time, of course — several weeks or months — but it does not take years. That is a really important message: we can get out of parental burnout. We can overcome it.”
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