Parental burnout: always available and never enough

“Sometimes after work I sit in the car outside our block of flats for another ten minutes. I’m not on the phone, I’m not listening to the radio. I just sit there. Because I know there are three people upstairs who need something, and I have nothing left.”

When people say this, they usually add an apology straight away: “I do love them, don’t get me wrong.” As if exhaustion meant there was no love. Yet it is precisely this combination — a deep attachment to your children and, at the same time, a sense that there is nothing left in you to give them — that is one of the recognisable signs of a state researchers have, for the past ten years, been calling parental burnout.

In this post I write about what parental burnout is, how to tell it apart from ordinary tiredness and from depression, what research in more than forty countries has shown, and why one of the strongest protective factors is something that does not happen inside you but between the two of you — a shared load.

It is not just tiredness

Every parent is tired. Sleepless nights with a baby, the morning rush, driving to training, homework at nine in the evening — this is part of parenting and it is not an illness. Tiredness that passes after a weekend at the grandparents’ is tiredness. Burnout is something else: a state in which the chronic stress of parenting builds up for so long that it begins to change your relationship with your own role and with your children.

The Belgian researchers Isabelle Roskam and Moïra Mikolajczak and their colleagues described parental burnout as a phenomenon in its own right and developed questionnaires to measure it. An important finding was that the state is specific to the parental role: a person can function perfectly well at work and still be burning out at home. With burnout at work you can step back, take leave or change jobs. Parenting has no holiday and no notice period. The children are there at six o’clock on a Saturday morning too.

You will find a short explanation of the concept in the knowledge base under parental burnout, and the wider picture under burnout.

Four layers of parental burnout

In their parental burnout questionnaire, the researchers described four dimensions that usually develop one after another (Roskam, Brianda & Mikolajczak, 2018). What matters is that all four are present together and over a longer period — one bad week, or one dimension on its own, is not yet burnout.

Most parents recognise themselves in the first dimension — exhaustion. The fourth, emotional distancing, frightens many. It is the most painful because it runs against everything a parent wants to be. So it is good to know: distancing in burnout is not coldness. It is the emergency brake of an organism that has run out of resources and is rationing the last of what it has left.

What a study in 42 countries showed

In 2021 an international team led by Isabelle Roskam published a study involving more than 17,000 parents from 42 countries (Roskam et al., 2021). They found parental burnout everywhere, but to very different degrees. The most surprising finding was that the differences between countries were best explained not by economic factors but by culture: parental burnout was more common in more individualistic, Western societies.

The explanations the authors offer feel close to my own experience. In individualistic cultures, parenting has increasingly become the private task of two people — or one — without a wider network of relatives and community to share the load. At the same time, expectations of parents have risen sharply: the child should be stimulated, heard and taken to the right activities, while the parent should be emotionally present and patient at all times. The bar for a “good parent” has gone up, while the support around them has shrunk.

This matters because it shifts the question. Parental burnout is not proof that you are a bad parent or not strong enough. It is often a sign that you are carrying alone something that used to be divided among many people.

It is not the same as depression

Because parental burnout and depression overlap in many ways — fatigue, emptiness, loss of joy — it is a fair question whether they are really two different things. A study comparing parental burnout, job burnout and depressive symptoms showed that they are related but distinct states (Mikolajczak et al., 2020).

Put simply: parental burnout is tied to the parental role. Someone burning out as a parent may still enjoy a conversation with a friend, their work or a walk on their own. Depression, on the other hand, usually colours everything — the loss of joy and energy spreads into every area of life, often with feelings of worthlessness that are not tied to parenting alone. I wrote more about recognising depression in the post Depression is not sadness: how to tell them apart and why it matters.

The distinction is not merely academic. With parental burnout, the key is to change the balance between demands and resources in the family; with depression, treatment assessed by a doctor is sometimes needed as well. Often the two are intertwined — long-lasting burnout can turn into depression. For new mothers, it is also worth thinking of postnatal depression. If you are not sure which of these you are going through, a conversation with your GP is a good first step.

The balance: what drags you down and what holds you up

Mikolajczak and Roskam (2018) described parental burnout with a model of a balance. On one side are the risk factors that increase the load, on the other the resources that ease it. Burnout does not arise because there are many demands, but because the demands outweigh the resources for a long time. This means you have two routes: reduce the load or increase the resources. The second is often the more achievable one.

The list of demands includes many things you cannot change — you do not choose your child’s illness. But on the resources side, almost everything depends at least partly on agreements and relationships. And this brings me to the point I consider the most important in this post.

A shared load: what happens between the two of you

One of the same team’s earlier studies (Mikolajczak, Raes, Avalosse & Roskam, 2018) examined which factors are most strongly linked to parental burnout. Sociodemographic details — age, education, number of children, income — explained surprisingly little. Far more was explained by factors related to relationships in the family: how the parents cooperate in raising the children, how satisfied they are as a couple, how organised everyday life is.

When I talk about a shared load, I do not just mean who does the washing-up. I also mean the invisible work that is hard to count: who knows that tomorrow is sports day, who notices that the child’s shoes are too small, who carries in their head the list of vaccinations, birthdays and parents’ evenings. We call this the mental load, and precisely because it is invisible, a partner often does not notice it — until the person carrying it breaks down.

Here is how a conversation might look that starts off badly and can turn around (a composite, not a real person):

“But I do help you. I took them to school yesterday.”
“Yes. Because I told you the night before that you had to, and packed their bags for you.”
“If you don’t tell me, I don’t know what needs doing.”
“That’s exactly the problem. I don’t need a helper. I need someone who knows without being told.”
Silence. “What if from now on I took over everything to do with school? All of it — including knowing when what is happening.”

The difference between “I’ll help you” and “this is mine” looks small but is in fact enormous. Helping leaves the responsibility with the other person. Taking over transfers it. For parents who are burning out, it is often exactly this shift that first opens up a little room. For more on how a couple’s relationship changes when children arrive, see The couple after a baby: how to keep your partnership alive through parenthood, and on what happens to a relationship when one partner burns out, Burnout and partnership.

Single parents do not have that partner — which makes a wider network all the more important for them. Grandparents, neighbours, other parents from nursery with whom you take turns are not a luxury, but a condition for the balance to be restored at all.

Why we must not stay silent about this

Parental burnout is not only an unpleasant state for the parent. Research has shown that it is linked to thoughts of escaping from the family, to suicidal thoughts, and to neglect of and violence towards children — and more strongly than job burnout or depressive symptoms are linked to these outcomes (Mikolajczak et al., 2018; Mikolajczak, Gross & Roskam, 2019).

I write this carefully, because I know how such a sentence can land on an already exhausted parent — as yet more proof that they are bad. That is not how it is meant. It is meant as the reason why parental burnout is not a private weakness to be hidden, but a state that deserves help. Parents in the deepest distress often feel the most shame and talk about it the least. I wrote more about why the most caring parents feel they do too little in Mother’s guilt: why the most devoted mothers are the ones who feel they do too little.

If you notice that you shout at or shake your child and are afraid you will not stop, or that you are thinking everyone would be better off without you, seek help today: from your GP, from the crisis line Klic v duševni stiski on 01 520 99 00 (every day from 7 pm to 7 am) or from the Samaritans helpline Zaupni telefon Samarijan on 116 123 (24 hours a day), both in Slovenia. If your child’s safety or your own is at risk, call 112.

Exercise: this week’s balance

You can do this exercise on your own, but even better with your partner or someone close to you. It takes twenty minutes.

1. Draw two columns on a sheet of paper: “what drags me down” and “what holds me up”. In each, write everything that comes to mind from the past week — small things too.
2. Next to each demand, mark whether it can be reduced, shared, or whether you simply have to carry it. Be honest: some demands really are unavoidable.
3. Choose one demand that can be handed over — not split in half but handed over completely. What matters is that the responsibility goes with it, not just the task.
4. Choose one resource you will add this week. An hour to yourself when no one calls for you. A friend you tell honestly how you are. A grandmother who comes on Wednesday afternoon.
5. A week later, check whether the balance has shifted. Don’t expect miracles; expect a shift of a few millimetres.

Guilt may chime in at the fourth step: “An hour to myself, while the children…?” This is exactly where it helps to know that children need a calm parent more than an ever-present one. A child learns how to calm down alongside an adult — we call this co-regulation — and an exhausted parent simply cannot offer that support. Time for yourself is not taken away from your children. It is an investment in them.

Where this view falls short

The concept of parental burnout is useful because it gives tired parents a word for something they have long carried in silence. But it also has limits I would not want to keep quiet about.

Not every kind of parental tiredness is burnout. Hard periods — the first year with a baby, illness in the family, a house move — are part of life. If we call every such period burnout, we risk making an ordinary, if demanding, part of parenting look like a disorder. Burnout is a long-lasting state with all four dimensions, not every difficult month.

Some burdens cannot be solved by an agreement at home. If there is no nursery place, if you work shifts with no say in them, if you are caring for your children and an ageing parent at the same time, no exercise will replace systemic support. Here the answer also lies elsewhere — in policy, in working conditions, in the community.

Parenting itself has a history. How we experience parenting is often connected with how we ourselves were parented, and with the transition that the birth of a child brings. That side is covered in the post Parenthood as a transition: who am I now that I am a mother or a father?. For some parents, burnout is closely intertwined with old wounds that no division of labour will heal.

How therapy can help

In relational family therapy, in which I am training, we do not see parental burnout as one person’s problem, but as a sign that something in the family system has got stuck. Sometimes it is the division of work between the partners, sometimes a role that the mother or father brought from their family of origin — for example the belief that they must manage everything alone, because it has always been that way. Sometimes it is the relationship with grandparents who help, but bring criticism along with their help.

Couples therapy can be a place where you talk about sharing the load for the first time without blame, and individual therapy a place where you can say even what you are not allowed to say anywhere else: that sometimes you have simply had enough. You do not have to wait until it gets worse. The sooner the balance starts to shift, the easier it is to restore. And alongside this, self-compassion instead of self-criticism is also valuable — the voice that tells you it is hard because it is hard, not because you are not good enough.

What to remember

• Parental burnout has four layers: exhaustion, feeling fed up, contrast with your former self, and emotional distancing from your children.
• In a study across 42 countries, it was more common in individualistic cultures — where parents carry a lot and have little support.
• It is not the same as depression: it is tied to the parental role, whereas depression colours everything.
• It arises when demands outweigh resources for a long time — which is why a shared load is one of the strongest protective factors.
• It is not a sign that you are a bad parent, but a sign that you need more support — and it makes sense to seek help early, not only when things are at their worst.