Is There a Vicious Cycle Between Parental Burnout and Parent–Adolescent Conflict? A Three-Wave Within-Family Analytic Approach

Abstract

Parental burnout is a chronic condition of experiencing exhaustion, inefficacy, and emotional distance in one's parental role. Given the detrimental influence of parental burnout on both parents and children, it is important to study the antecedents and consequences of parental burnout, particularly at the within-family level. Using a three-wave sample of 443 Chinese parents (70% mothers; mean age = 41.81 years, SD = 3.81 years) of middle school adolescents (50% girls; mean age = 13.35 years, SD = 0.36 years), the present study examined the transactional processes between parental burnout and parent–adolescent conflict. Random intercept cross-lagged panel modeling allowed the present study to focus on within-family effects by using random intercepts to account for between-family effects. In this way, this study can rule out time-invariant confounds by focusing on whether the ups and downs of parental burnout at a family level contribute to the changes in parent–adolescent conflict, and vice versa. At the within-family level, parental burnout predicted greater parent–adolescent conflict over time, and parent–adolescent conflict also predicted greater parental burnout over time. Notably, multigroup comparisons showed that the link from parent–adolescent conflict to parental burnout was only significant among parents with lower but not higher educational attainment, and the link from parental burnout to parent–adolescent conflict was only evident among mothers but not fathers. Taken together, the findings suggest that parental burnout and parent–adolescent conflict positively shape and sustain one another over time, highlighting the necessity to adapt the designs of family conflict interventions in treating and preventing parental burnout.