Basic Personal Values and Parental Burnout: A Brief Report.

Recent evidence has shown that Western parents are five times more vulnerable to developing parental burnout than parents in other parts of the world. It has also been found that this augmented susceptibility is explained by the group tendency of individualism cultural value that prevails in Western societies. Still, whether this relation observed at the group mean level across countries can be generalized to the association of personal value with parental burnout across individuals has not yet been explored. In order to address this question, the current study collected a sample of 643 Polish parents and assessed their report of value priorities and parental burnout. The results demonstrated that individual-level values indeed predict susceptibility to parental burnout. Specifically, parents are more susceptible to parental burnout when prioritizing values that emphasize power and achievement, whereas prioritizing benevolence protects parents from parental burnout. Associations between parents' gender, personal values, and parental burnout were also examined. Consistent with previous studies, fathers reported fewer parental burnout symptoms compared to mothers. However, gender differences in parental burnout were not mediated by personal values, nor did parents' gender moderate the effect of personal values on burnout. In sum, together with previous results obtained at the society level, our finding points out the role of values in predicting parental burnout. A possible future direction of research was discussed: examining the affective mechanism (e.g. parental regulation of emotions) underlying the relationship between personal values and parental burnout. Supplementary Information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s42761-022-00103-y.

Reappraisal, social support, and parental burnout.

OBJECTIVES: Parental burnout is a prevalent condition that affects parents' functioning and health. While various protective factors have been examined, little is known about their interplay. In the current study, we examined the joint effect of two protective factors against parental burnout (one external-social support and one internal-cognitive reappraisal). We were specifically interested in whether the presence of one factor could compensate for the lack of the other. METHODS: To address this question, 1835 participants were drawn from five countries: United States, Poland, Peru, Turkey and Belgium. RESULTS: Results suggested that both social support and cognitive reappraisal were associated with lower parental burnout. An interaction was also found between the resource factors, such that the presence of cognitive reappraisal compensated for the absence of social support. CONCLUSIONS: These findings point to ways in which parental burnout could be reduced, especially in situations where social support is not easily available.

Parental Burnout Around the Globe: a 42-Country Study.

High levels of stress in the parenting domain can lead to parental burnout, a condition that has severe consequences for both parents and children. It is not yet clear, however, whether parental burnout varies by culture, and if so, why it might do so. In this study, we examined the prevalence of parental burnout in 42 countries (17,409 parents; 71% mothers; Mage = 39.20) and showed that the prevalence of parental burnout varies dramatically across countries. Analyses of cultural values revealed that individualistic cultures, in particular, displayed a noticeably higher prevalence and mean level of parental burnout. Indeed, individualism plays a larger role in parental burnout than either economic inequalities across countries, or any other individual and family characteristic examined so far, including the number and age of children and the number of hours spent with them. These results suggest that cultural values in Western countries may put parents under heightened levels of stress. Supplementary Information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s42761-020-00028-4.