Belgian researchers including Isabelle Roskam, PhD, and Moïra Mikolajczak, PhD, both professors of psychology at the Catholic University of Louvain in Belgium, theorized that while severe situations such as a sick child can contribute to burnout, any parent can experience it.
In 2018, after surveying more than 900 parents, Roskam and her colleagues developed a measurement called the Parental Burnout Assessment. From their subjects' testimonies, the researchers extracted four dimensions of parental burnout: exhaustion in one's parental role, contrast with previous parental self, feelings of being fed up with one’s parental role, and emotional distancing from one’s children.
To learn more about what causes burnout, the researchers later studied more than 17,000 parents in 42 countries around the world and discovered burnout varied drastically by country, based on the differences in Eastern and Western cultural values.
According to Roskam, all parents who reported burnout before and during the pandemic had one thing in common. "Burnout is the result of too much stress and the absence of resources to cope with it," she said. "You will burn out only if there is an imbalance between stress and resources."
So the next time you ask your mom for a favor, try to stop for a second and think if you really need her help. Just because she can squeeze it into her day doesn't mean that she should!
