The Mechanisms of Parental Burnout Affecting Adolescents' Problem Behavior

Exploring Emotional Dysregulation and Avoidance with Caregivers as the Mechanisms Linking Social Communication Understanding and Aggressive Behaviours

Many autistic adolescents and young adults present with aggressive behaviours, which can be challenging for caregivers. The present study aimed to explore the underlying mechanisms between social communication understanding and aggressive behaviours in autistic and non-autistic adolescents, specifically the role of emotional dysregulation and its impact on avoidance with caregivers. Caregivers of autistic (n = 275) and non-autistic adolescents (n = 123) completed standardised caregiver-report questionnaires measuring social communication understanding, emotional dysregulation, avoidance between the adolescent and caregiver and aggressive behaviours. A serial mediation analysis indicated that levels of social communication understanding were indirectly associated with aggressive behaviours. This occurred through increased emotional dysregulation, which may have led to increased avoidance between the autistic and non-autistic adolescents and their caregivers. These findings support a sequential process by which adolescents with low social communication understanding are more likely to behave aggressively through being emotionally dysregulated and the impact of this on the increased avoidance within the caregiver-adolescent dyad. This process was found within autistic and non-autistic adolescents, suggesting a mechanism across individuals with aggression. These findings indicate that interventions based on improving emotion regulation ability and responses between adolescents and their caregivers may aid in reducing aggressive behaviours in adolescents and young adults with lower social communication understanding.

A systematic review of parental burnout and related factors among parents

BACKGROUND

Parenting is both a complex and stressful endeavor, so parents sometimes experience parenting burnout. The main objective of this study was to provide an overview of factors related to general parental burnout (PB) among parents with at least one child based on the Ecological Systems Theory (EST).

METHODS

PubMed, Web of Science, EBSCO, CNKI and WanFang were systematically searched for studies published from 2010 to July 2023 for peer-reviewed articles using keywords extracted from Medical Subject Headings such as "parenting", "parental", "burnout", "psychological burnout", "burn-out syndrome". Studies were included if they described associations between factors and PB among parents of children aged 0-18 years old in the general population, and published in an English or Chinese language peer-reviewed journal. The Quality Assessment Tool for Studies with Diverse Designs (QATSDD) was employed to assess the risk of bias of included studies.

RESULTS

Of 2037 articles, 26 articles met the inclusion criteria. Based on the Ecological Systems Theory (EST), we found that microsystem-individual factors such as gender, educational level, income, parental personality, internalization of maternal parental motivation, unmitigated communion, self-compassion and concern for others, alexithymia, anxiety and depressive symptoms, parental perfectionism, resilience, low self-esteem and high need for control, mother's attachment style were identified as being associated with parenting burnout. Mesosystem-interpersonal factors involve parent-child relationship and marital satisfaction. The exosystem-organizational or community factors include the number of children in the household, neighborhood and the number of hours spent with children, child's illness, child's behavior problems and social support. The macrosystem-society/policy or culture factors are mainly personal values and cultural values.

CONCLUSIONS

This systematic review found several factors that have been investigated in relation to PB. However, the majority of the factors were reported by one or two studies often implementing a cross-sectional design. Nevertheless, we still recommend that health policymakers and administrators relieve parenting burnout among parents with children by adjusting these modifiable factors.

Parental burnout, depression and emotional development of the preschoolers

Introduction

Parental burnout is becoming more and more prevalent in the world, mainly incultures with high demands towards parents. Parental burnout is distinctive from depression and might have its unique influence on child development, which isunder current international research. This work contributes to the understanding of parental burnout, maternal depression and child emotional development(specifically emotion comprehension) interrelations. Additionally, we explored whether there are differences in the effects of parental burnout and depressionon boys and girls.

Methods

To analyse the emotional development of the preschoolers, the Russian version of the Test of Emotional Comprehension (TEC) was used. We used the Russian version of the Parental Burnout Inventory (PBI) to analyse the level of PB and the Russian version of Beck depression Inventory (BDI) to assess participants' depression level.

Results

Parental burnout positively correlates with child emotional comprehension skills, specifically understanding of external causes (B = 0.20, CI: 0.03; 0.37) and mental causes of emotions (B = 0.22, CI: 0.05; 0.40). This effect is gender dependent and is significantlyhigher for girls (B = 0.54, CI: 0.09; 0.98). The effect of maternal depression on emotion comprehension skills is also gender dependent: total scores on emotioncomprehension tasks are significantly higher for daughters of mothers with depression (B = 0.59, CI: 0.001; 1.18).

Discussion

Maternal depression and parental burnout might provoke development of extra sensitivity and self-regulation strategies in girls.

The mediating role of perceived social support: alexithymia and parental burnout in parents of children with autism spectrum disorder

Background

Parental burnout is a concept that reflects the emotional exhaustion and emotional distance of parents from children due to their inability to cope with the pressure of parenting. It has been confirmed that parents of autistic children are at higher risk for parental burnout. Additional research has suggested a relationship between parental burnout and parents' personality traits. However, the relationship between alexithymia, an independent personality factor, with parental burnout is little to none.

Objective

To look into the connection between parental burnout and alexithymia among parents of autistic children.

Method

Three hundred and one parents were approached for recruitment and data were collected from 203 parents through a cross-sectional survey assessing parental burnout, alexithymia status, and perceived social support. Because the data is not normally distributed, Spearman's rank correlation coefficient rho(p) was used to assess the correlation between the variables; and then using AMOS to analyze the mediating effects of perceived social support and the moderating effect of gender.

Result

The result showed that (1) There is a negative association between alexithymia with parental burnout (β = 0.6, p < 0.01), while perceive social support was the negative predictor of alexithymia (β = -0.45, p < 0.01) and parental burnout (β = -0.26, p < 0.01); (2) perceive social support partially mediated the relationship between alexithymia and parental burnout of parents of autistic children, which can explain 16.3% of the total effect; (3) Gender plays a moderating role in the first half of the indirect effect of alexithymia on parental burnout, as evidenced by the significant difference in path coefficients between the male and female models (male: β = -0.10, p < 0.05; female: β = -0.60, p < 0.05).

Conclusion

Health professionals and policymakers should be aware of parental burnout among parents of autistic children in China and take early intervention steps. Furthermore, they should recognize the negative impact of alexithymia and the positive impact of social support when developing plans to alleviate parental burnout in children with autism, with a particular focus on mothers with alexithymia, who are more likely to experience low social support and burnout than fathers with alexithymia.