Aiming to be perfect parents increases the risk of parental burnout, but emotional competence mitigates it

[en] Parenting perfectionism, especially the dimension of perfectionistic concerns—preoccupation with self-criticism including concern over mistakes and doubts about own behaviors—, has been shown to be a weighty factor for parental burnout. Drawing on the Balance between Risks and Resources (BR2) theory of parental burnout, this paper examines whether emotional competence could moderate/buffer the effect of parenting perfectionism on parental burnout. We investigated this question in two independent samples of parents collected in Belgium (N = 347) and Poland (N = 377). The results of both studies show that emotional competence cancels out the detrimental effect of perfectionistic concerns on parental burnout. Beyond its contribution to parenting perfectionism and emotional competence literatures, the present article also provides further evidence of the potential of the BR2 theory of parental burnout.

Disciplines :

Treatment & clinical psychology

Author, co-author :

Lin, Gao-Xian ^✱; Psychological Sciences Research Institute, Department of Psychology, Catholic University of Louvain, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium

Szczygieł, Dorota ^✱; SWPS University of Humanities and Social Sciences, Warszawa, Poland

Hansotte, Logan ^✱; Université de Mons - UMONS ; Psychological Sciences Research Institute, Department of Psychology, Catholic University of Louvain, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium

Roskam, Isabelle ; Psychological Sciences Research Institute, Department of Psychology, Catholic University of Louvain, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium

Mikolajczak, Moïra ; Psychological Sciences Research Institute, Department of Psychology, Catholic University of Louvain, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium

^✱ These authors have contributed equally to this work.

Language :

English

Title :

Aiming to be perfect parents increases the risk of parental burnout, but emotional competence mitigates it

Publication date :

2021

Journal title :

Current Psychology

ISSN :

1046-1310

eISSN :

1936-4733

Publisher :

Springer

Peer reviewed :

Editorial Reviewed verified by ORBi

Additional URL :

http://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s12144-021-01509-w.pdf

Research institute :

Santé
Soci&Ter

Funders :

French Community of Belgium

Funding text :

M.M., I.R., and G.-X.L. were supported by a Coordinated Research Grant from the French Community of Belgium (ARC Grant n°19/24–100). This fund did not exert any influence or censorship of any kind on the present work.

Available on ORBi UMONS :

since 17 June 2022

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