Emotional exhaustion and feeling fed up as the driving forces of parental burnout and its consequences on children: insights from a network approach

Parental burnout results from chronic stress in parenting, and it can be accompanied by harmful behaviors such as parental neglect and violence (Mikolajczak & Roskam, 2018). Network analysis examines psychological phenomena within a system of its constituents, and thus it is promising for understanding the distinct features of parental burnout and behaviors related to it. Recently, Blanchard et al. (2021) conducted the first network analysis of parental burnout and related harmful behaviors in the family context, but did so using an outdated measure and conceptualization of parental burnout. In the present study, in a sample of French-speaking parents (N = 3144, from five different previous studies), we aimed to investigate how each of the four features in the new conceptualization of parental burnout (i.e., emotional exhaustion, feeling fed up, emotional distance, and contrast with the previous parental self) interact with one another and with parental neglect and violence in a network system. In this preregistered reanalysis, we generated two network models commonly used with cross-sectional data: a Graphical Gaussian Model and a Directed Acyclic Graph. Our results point to emotional exhaustion and feeling fed up as key driving forces of the network structure, while emotional distance appears as a critical feature tying parental burnout with parental neglect and violence.