Exhausted parents ‘face burn-out’

FAMILIES are facing ‘parental burn-out’ due to pressures of working remotely and homeschooling children, experts have warned.

Burn-out was recognised for the first time last year by the World Health Organisation as a phenomenon where overworked people feel exhausted, cynical and inefficient.

Interviews with almost 600 parents and guardians by researchers at King’s College London found more than half of women, and 43 per cent of men, said they felt more anxious and depressed than usual.

Parental burn-out is reported to have three symptoms – making people feel so exhausted they can’t get out of bed, feeling emotionally detached from their children, and stripped of the pleasure and joy they normally take in parenting. Advising families on how to cope, Tony Cassidy, professor of child and family health psychology at Ulster University, said: ‘Planning and organisation is key – parents need to share out the work of childcare and home-schooling, not allowing these responsibilities to dominate their time.’

However Dr Helen Griffiths and Julia Faulconbridge, of the British Psychological Society, cautioned: ‘The idea that there is a diagnosis of “parental burn-out” with particular symptoms is incorrect and actually unhelpful.’

They said the pandemic will have created ‘understandable emotions such as stress, unhappiness and anxiety’, but added that ‘for most people these are normal reactions to an abnormal situation’.