Parental Burnout and Child Behavior: A Preliminary Analysis of Mediating and Moderating Effects of Positive Parenting.

Despite its significant growth over the past fifteen years, research on parental burnout is just beginning to explore the relationships of the syndrome with child behavior. Previous research with adolescents has shown the existence of associations between parental burnout and internalizing and externalizing behaviors in the offspring. The current study is an attempt to (i) replicate this preliminary evidence specifically among Chilean preschool children and (ii) explore the mediating/moderating effects of positive parenting that may be involved in these putative associations. A sample of 383 Chilean mothers participated in this cross-sectional online study. The results confirmed the associations between parental burnout and child internalizing and externalizing behaviors. We also observed that positive parenting was a mediator in the relationship linking parental burnout and the child's internalizing (full mediation) and externalizing (partial mediation) behaviors. Positive parenting also partially mediated the association between the child's externalizing behavior and parental burnout. Our results further suggested that the child's externalizing behavior was possibly a more substantial contributing factor to parental burnout than the child's internalizing behavior.

An experimental manipulation of cognitive appraisals in parental burnout.

As it often applies to other mental conditions, one may posit that cognitive appraisals might be causal in the onset and maintenance of parental burnout. Recent studies have indeed highlighted that negative cognitive appraisals are positively associated with parental burnout. Howbeit, none of these studies being experimental in design, it has-thus far-been impossible to establish causality. To shed light on the question, the present study relied on an experimental design where the perception of three known antecedents of parental burnout was manipulated: co-parenting support, emotion regulation and child-rearing practices. 313 French- and English-speaking parents took part in the study which employed a 4 (Condition: control, perceived co-parenting support, perceived emotion regulation, perceived efficacy of child-rearing practices) × 2 (Time: pre- and post-manipulation) mixed-design, with Condition as the between-subject factor and Time as the within-subject factor. Results showed that the experimental manipulation was effective in the "co-parenting support" condition solely and this effective manipulation further yielded a significant effect on the decrease of parental burnout scores, hence suggesting a causative relation between cognitive appraisals and parental burnout. Our results highlight both the complexity of manipulating parents' cognitive appraisals and the scope for relieving partnered parents from their parental burnout symptoms.

The role of cognitive appraisals in parental burnout: a preliminary analysis during the COVID-19 quarantine.

Counter-intuitively, sociodemographic characteristics account for a small proportion of explained variance in parental burnout. The present study conducted during the Covid-19 pandemic asks whether (i) sociodemographic characteristics are more predictive of parental burnout than usual in a situation of lockdown, (ii) situational factors, that is, the specific restrictive living conditions inherent in the context of lockdown, predict parental burnout better than sociodemographic characteristics do, and (iii) the impact of both sociodemographic and situational factors is moderated or mediated by the parents' subjective perception of the impact that the health crisis has had on their parenting circumstances. Results show that, within the context of lockdown, both sociodemographic and situational factors explain a negligible proportion of variance in parental burnout. By contrast, parents' cognitive appraisals of their parenthood within the context of the health crisis were found to play both a crucial mediating and moderating role in the prediction of parental burnout.