Parental burnout, emotion suppression, and sleep

I am presenting abstracts of two studies related to exhaustion and sleep. In the first, Blanchard, Hoebeke & Heeren (2023) published “Parental Burnout Features and the Family Context: A temporal network approach in mothers” in Journal of Family Psychology. Here’s the abstract with some information in bold:

Many parents have days where they encounter emotional exhaustion, emotional distance from their children, and feeling fed up with being a parent. Some parents experience these characteristics to a severe extent—a clinical phenomenon termed parental burnout. Parental burnout arises when parents chronically endure severe stress without sufficient resources to cope, which may lead to detrimental consequences not only for the parent but also for their partner (e.g., marital conflict) and children (i.e., neglect and violence). However, uncertainty remains regarding how these features interact and trigger one another over time (potentially becoming increasingly severe), nor how the daily variations of the family context influence these features. Therefore, in this study, we recruited 50 parents (with main analyses focusing on 43 mothers with a co-parent, and sensitivity analyses with the full sample) from the general population to rate the core features of parental burnout and the family context daily over 56 days. We used multilevel vector autoregressive models to generate network models. Results suggest that exhaustion contributes to parental burnout: It self-predicts and is closely associated with feeling fed up and finding children difficult to manage. Distance, by contrast, is mainly negatively connected to sharing positive moments with children. Contextual variables also interact with parental burnout features, illustrating the relevance of examining parenting within the family system context. If future research confirms a central role of exhaustion in parental burnout development, prevention efforts can focus on decreasing parental exhaustion. 

I like this article because it highlights and defines parental burnout. As a parent, I also like the fact that exhaustion is a major contributor to such burnout. I think this next study may also be both helpful and interesting. Zhu, Martin, Kane & Park (2023) published “Is Daily Emotion Suppression Associated with Poor Sleep? The moderating role of culture” in Emotion. Here’s the abstract with bold:

Emotion suppression is widely assumed to be unhealthy. Yet, this conclusion may be limited to independent Western cultures that value self-expression. In a pre-registered, daily diary study of European American and East Asian college students, we tested whether culture moderates the effects of daily use of emotion suppression on sleep—a critical component of healthy living among young adults. A total of 117 college students (62 European Americans and 55 East Asians) completed two diaries per day for 14 days to assess (a) their daily use of emotion suppression every night and (b) subjective sleep quality and mood upon awakening every morning. Participants also wore actigraphy watches to provide behavioral measures of sleep. The data were collected between 2018 and 2020. We used multilevel models to test cultural differences in the effects of emotion suppression on sleep and mood measures at both between-person (average) and within-person (day-to-day) levels. For European Americans, greater use of emotion suppression across 2 weeks was associated with lower average subjective sleep quality and more tense (vs. calm) feelings upon awakening. At the within-person level, on days when European Americans used emotion suppression more than usual, they had less sleep that night. In contrast, these associations were completely absent among East Asians. These results provide support for the cultural fit hypothesis that how emotion suppression affects sleep health varies by cultural contexts, depending on whether this regulatory behavior is normatively congruous or incongruous with the values prioritized in each culture. 

Now, it may seem that the two articles are unrelated. However, the finding that emotion suppression by European-Americans is related to poor sleep is interesting to me in two ways. First, returning to the Blanchard et al. research, it seems to me that emotion suppression is often part of parental burnout which may feed a cycle of exhaustion, emotion suppression, poor sleep, and parental burnout. Second, I have written before about individualist vs. collectivist cultures. The fact that college students of East Asian descent have no relationship between emotion suppression and sleep makes sense in their more collectivist cultural context. The isolation often bred by individualist cultures may well exacerbate parenting stress and exhaustion. Both articles emphasize culture – family systems and cultural context – both of which may be essential in understanding family stress.