Exhausted Parents Experience of Anger: The Relationship Between Anger and Burnout

Parental Burnout

Parental burnout is a combination of a devastating exhaustion and a feeling that you are not good enough as a parent (Mikolajczak et al., 2018), which stems from social comparison (Chae, 2014). Precursors to mothers becoming burned out may include experiencing social pressure to be an ideal parent (Meeussen & Van Laar, 2018), trying to avoid parenting mistakes, and assuming primary responsibility for caring for the children in comparison to the partner’s parenting responsibilities. Hubert and Aujoulat (2018) explored mothers’ parenting experiences and found fear of not being a good mother was central to the mothering role, accompanied by three factors that make parents prone to burnout: (a) inability to maintain emotionally positive relationships with their children, (b) difficulty in structuring a child’s environment, and (c) inability to understand a child’s needs (Vigouroux et al., 2017). These factors are associated with the structure of the Parental Burnout Assessment (PBA; Roskam et al., 2018).

According to Roskam et al. (2018), parental burnout consists of four components: (a) contrast, (b) saturation, (c) distancing, and (d) exhaustion. Contrast represents the change between what a person used to be as a parent and what they have become, which is usually accompanied by shame. Saturation is metaphorically described as being “fed up” with parenting. Distancing is an inability to do anything outside of usual routines. Finally, exhaustion represents overtiredness associated with the parenting role, which may result in aggression (Mikolajczak et al., 2018).

Researchers investigated burnout among parents (N = 16,685) in 40 countries and found parents in the United States had one of the highest levels of burnout, with approximately 7%–8% of them reporting exhaustion and wanting to take a break from parenting (Roskam et al., 2020). Interestingly, the researchers found culture may influence the prevalence of burnout. Parents who lived in countries where individualistic cultures had higher levels of burnout regardless of sociodemographic variables, workload, and economic inequalities. Roskam et al. highlighted the change in parenting norms in European and North American countries where parents experience social pressure to excel in child-rearing. The demands society places on parents can translate to social prescribed perfectionism (Sorkkila & Aunola, 2020) that becomes a risk factor for parental burnout.

Researchers also examined factors that may contribute to individual differences in parental burnout, including personality traits (Vigouroux & Scola, 2018). They found lack of emotional self-control and neuroticism was related to burnout, and lack of emotional self-control was a risk factor for developing burnout along with parental meticulousness. Emotional control is linked to emotion self-regulation, which is necessary for parents who experience intense emotions (i.e., anger) toward their children.

Parent Anger

Despite its universality, anger remains one of the least studied emotions (Ekman, 2016). Anger arises when a person encounters interferences with goal-directed activities (Alia-Klein et al., 2020). Alia-Klein et al. described two components of anger: (a) arousal and (b) cognition. Arousal is a reaction to a stressor that is associated with unpredictability or uncontrollability of the situation or an event. Cognition focuses on thoughts about the situation that arise when attention is focused on the source of anger provoking stressor. When feeling angry, a person may think, “I do not deserve this!” For a parent, this may translate to, when becoming angry at their child, thinking or even saying they don’t deserve disrespect from their child.

According to the recalibration theory of anger (Sell et al., 2017), a person experiences anger when they want better treatment. Sell et al. tested this theory in 23 experiments in six cultures and found people became angrier when the benefit the offender received was small and the cost for the one who was offended was large. According to this theory, the function of anger is to resolve a conflict, so that the angry individual would get what they want. The anger is mostly activated by what people think of one another, and anger is expressed to recalibrate the target’s mind (Sell et al., 2017). For instance, when a mother yells at her child for not cleaning their room, she wants them to change their attitudes toward cleaning more than getting the room clean. Thus, parents express anger when they want to change the way their children think and/or behave. Experience of anger may relate to feeling disrespect that stems from the child’s disobedience. Burned out parents may be so exhausted that aggressive behavior becomes the last option to cope with a child’s emotion dysregulation. Parental anger typically intensifies negative emotional expression in communication because aggressive behavior is not a healthy way to discipline a child and does not model appropriate emotion regulation (Eisenberg et al., 1999). Therefore, the child does not learn how to regulate their emotions, and the misbehavior becomes a pattern.

Anger is often coined as a secondary emotion, which means that it becomes an affective reaction to other emotional states (Gardner & Moore, 2008). According to Fruzzetti and Worrall (2010), a primary emotion is an adaptive response to a stimulus, and a secondary emotion is a learned reaction either to the primary emotion or to the stimulus. In general, secondary emotions are less adaptive. For example, a parent may feel anxiety when waiting for a child to get home from school and the child is late. Anxiety is the primary emotion. The parent may express frustration or anger (a secondary emotion in this situation) when the child comes home. This anger is not accurately describing the primary emotion (anxiety) and creates a conflict that makes a parent and a child distant, instead of bringing them together. In situations where anger is a secondary emotion, it is typically mediated by judgments, and anger expression leads to distress in the relationship (Fruzzetti & Iverson, 2004; Fruzzetti et al., 2005).

Shame is another feeling that may be the primary emotion underlying anger expression. Parents experiencing burnout are prone to shame (Hubert & Aujoulat, 2018), which stems from self-judgments and lack of self-compassion. Tangney et al. (1992) found shame-proneness was associated with anger arousal and indirect expressions of hostility. The transformation of shame into anger is called humiliated fury (Kirchner et al., 2018). Parents can reduce the occurrence of humiliated fury by regulating anger with accurate expression (Fruzzetti & Payne, 2020), which involves a person mindfully observing their feelings and expressing the primary emotion.

Need and Purpose of the Study

It is crucial to investigate the relationship between parental burnout and anger as they may both have devastating effects on children. Specifically, exhausted, burn out mothers may engage in neglectful behavior (leaving children unsupervised) or aggressive behavior in the form of verbal and physical child abuse (Mikolajczak et al., 2018). Additionally, parents who tend to abuse their children experience and express intense anger (Plate et al., 2019), and expressing anger through aggressive behavior leads to an increase of anger and aggression (Bushman, 2002). Children who are abused have higher levels of emotional reactivity and impulsive responses to distress, which leads to emotion dysregulation. Heightened emotional reactivity and impulsivity are associated with the onset of psychopathology (Heleniak et al., 2016). Additionally, children who develop emotion dysregulation translate it to their peer relationships (Dickson et al., 2019), exacerbating the cycle of violence in society. In contrast, parental anger regulation is beneficial for children’s mental health as parents are the primary source of emotion socialization. Children learn about emotion regulation through observing their parents’ behavior in emotionally charged situations (Thompson, 2014). For example, when parents frequently express anger in front of their children, they lower their children’s ability to regulate anger in a constructive way (Dollar & Calkins, 2019). Therefore, self-care and emotion regulation skills become crucial in reducing parental aggression toward children (Crouch & Behl, 2001). However, it is challenging to regulate anger when a parent is experiencing exhaustion and burnout because emotion regulation requires energy, and stress inhibits emotion regulation (Raio et al., 2013). Grillon et al. (2015) reported mental fatigue impairs emotion regulation without affecting emotion reactivity. Thus, when a parent is mentally exhausted, they will have difficulty regulating their emotions, but their anger reactions (i.e., aggression) will remain the same.

Researchers have implied a connection between parental burnout and anger; however, the authors found no studies focused directly on examining the relationship between parental anger and burnout. This research is crucial in understanding theoretical underpinnings of parental burnout, as well as informing counselors about effective ways to help parents cope with burnout, and regulate anger experience and expression. This is important because burnout is common among American parents (Roskam et al., 2020), and it becomes a risk factor for child maltreatment (Mikolajczak et al., 2018). Additionally, dysregulated anger may lead to child abuse (Plate et al., 2019). Thus, in the current study, we examined the relationship between parental anger and burnout to answer the following research question:

Research Question 1: Does parental burnout predict experience and expression of parental anger?

Method

Data Analysis

The authors used G*Power (Faul et al., 2009) to conduct an a priori power analyses. With an α level of .05, minimum power established at .95, and a medium effect size of .3 (Cohen, 1992), 115 participants were needed to find a statistically significant difference for a correlational analysis. Therefore, the number of cases in the present study (N = 226) was large enough to run a Pearson correlational analysis. There were no outliers, and the data met the assumptions of homoscedasticity and linearity. The assumption of normality was not met. Thus, the authors used the log technique to transform the data. Correlations and multiple regression coefficients are presented in Tables 1–2. For multiple regression with four predictors, with an α level of .05, power of .95, and a medium effect size of .3, a sufficient sample size was 67. Thus, the sample was large enough to run all analyses. The data also met the assumptions for multiple regression (independence, homogeneity of variance, and multicollinearity) except for normality.

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Table 1.

Descriptive Statistics and Correlations for Normalized Study Variables.

Variable	M	SD	1	2	3	4	5	6
1. Anger expression	1.1	.1	1	.61**	.24**	.49**	.30**	.38**
2. Anger experience	1.3	.15	.61**	1	.36**	.35**	.50**	.40**
3. PBA distancing	0.56	.15	.24**	.36**	1	.52**	.42**	.66**
4. PBA contrast	0.91	.15	.49**	.35**	.52**	1	.65**	.71**
5. PBA exhaustion	1.2	.19	.30**	.50**	.42**	.65**	1	.52**
6. PBA saturation	0.77	.14	.38**	.40**	.66**	.71**	.52**	1

Note. N = 226. PBA = Parental Burnout Assessment.

*p < .05. **p < .01.

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Table 2.

Regression Coefficients of Parental Burnout on Anger Experience Based on Normalized Variables.

	Model
Variable	B	β	SE	T	P	95% CI
Constant	.721		.061	11.891	.000	[.601, .840]
Contrast	.268	.272	.089	3.002	.003	[.092, .444]
Exhaustion	.230	.289	.059	3.903	.000	[.114, .347]
Saturation	−.010	−.009	.101	−.100	.921	[−.209, .189]
Distancing	.103	.100	.078	1.334	.183	[−.049, .256]

Results

The authors ran correlational analyses to examine the relationships between parent anger and burnout, and significant correlations were found between parent anger and PBA scales of contrast and exhaustion (see Table 2). There was a correlation between anger experience and both contrast (r = .50, p < .001) and exhaustion (r = .50, p < .001). Additionally, anger expression correlated with exhaustion (r = .30 p < .001) and contrast (r = .49, p < .001). The researchers then ran a multiple linear regression analysis to examine whether parental burnout predicted anger experience and expression and found parental burnout contrast and exhaustion predicted anger experience, F(4, 221) = 25.560, p < .001 (see Table 2). The regression equation for predicting anger experience as a result of parental burnout contrast and exhaustion is: Anger experience = .721 + .268(contrast) + .230 (exhaustion). Accuracy in predicting anger experience was fairly strong with a multiple correlation coefficient of .562. About 31% (R ² = .316) of variance of anger experience was accounted for by the regression model.

Parental burnout contrast predicted anger expression, F(4, 221) = 14.460, p < .001. The regression equation for predicting anger expression as a result of parental burnout contrast is: Anger expression = .811 + .326 (contrast). The multiple correlation coefficient was .49. Approximately 24% (R ² = .240) of the variance of anger expression was accounted for by the regression model.

Discussion

Multiple regression analyses revealed parent burnout predicted parent anger experience and expression. Specifically, burnout contrast and exhaustion predicted anger experience. Additionally, burnout contrast predicted anger expression. The contrast subscale is associated with comparing oneself as a father or mother with oneself in the past. People who score high on this subscale believe they are not as good of parents as they used to be for their children. Parents may feel shame for who they have become as caregivers, and not think they are themselves when they communicate with their children. The scale of exhaustion represents physical and emotional aspects of fatigue. Exhausted parents do not get enough sleep, have no energy to parent, and function like being on autopilot. Additionally, they feel worn out and exhausted when they wake up in the morning; surviving parenting takes all their resources.

One possible explanation for contrast being a significant parent anger predictor relates to the shame domain. Parents feel ashamed of who they have become as caregivers, comparing themselves to who they were a while ago and being ashamed because they lost their direction in parenting. Shame, when not emotionally regulated, may result in humiliated fury (Kirchner et al., 2018). According to Tangney et al. (1992), a person who feels ashamed may become hostile and attack. The parent who scores high on the scale of contrast may be ashamed of themselves for not being the parent they want to be, but this feeling of shame is too painful for them, so they attack the person who has become the trigger for their shame, their child. According to Hubert and Aujoulat (2018), exhausted parents experience shame by being afraid they will harm their children and will be judged. These judgments can come from other people, including children, as well as from internalized social beliefs about parenting.

Anger is often called a secondary emotion because people tend to use it to protect or cover vulnerable feelings. While the scale of exhaustion predicted only anger experience, the scale of contrast predicted anger expression as well. Shame, associated with the scale of contrast, is an emotion that implies an intention to hide away, so that no one sees you. Anger experience can be hidden; however, anger expression is overt, being witnessed by children, other family members, and strangers when a person becomes angry in public. Therefore, the more vulnerable a parent is, the more likely they might be to engage in anger expression instead of accurately expressing shame. Additionally, according to the recalibration theory of anger, this emotion arises when a person wants better treatment or to get what they want (Sell et al., 2017). The baseline for exhausted parent is not enjoying their time with their children. Parents may even want to run away from children or die. Thus, when a child is misbehaving, the exhaustion worsens, but the lack of resources to regulate emotions prohibits parents from coping with their anger in healthy ways.

Implications for Counseling

Counselors have a pivotal role in working with burned out parents who experience emotion dysregulation of anger. One of the ways to help parents is providing psychoeducation on emotion regulation, validation, and accurate expression of emotions. Parental anger and aggression in the form of harsh discipline is passed from generation to generation (Niu et al., 2018), establishing a vicious circle of violence that can be stopped when counselors intervene.

Negative emotions are central to relationship distress. Behavior patterns are influenced by the extent to which a person is able to regulate their emotions (Fruzzetti et al., 2005). Emotion regulation of anger is vital for parents, as an inability to control one’s anger may be detrimental to a child’s well-being. Counselors may use assessments, such as the PBA (Roskam et al., 2018), PAS (Gavita et al., 2011), and Parent Emotion Regulation Scale (Pereira et al., 2017) to identify the level of parental burnout, anger, and emotion regulation. Additionally, parents may benefit from self-validation and accurate expression of emotions, learning to express primary emotions instead of secondary ones (Fruzzetti, 2013). Counselors can educate parents about the nature of emotions and explore situations when specific emotions occurred, and they were able to successfully regulate their emotions. Counselors can help parent develop healthy ways for expression of anger, focusing on the primary emotions that occur before anger, as a secondary emotion, occurs. A way to explain secondary emotions to parents is through introducing the metaphor of an anger iceberg (Benson, 2016), which represents other emotions and feelings that may hide below the surface. Counselors can give their clients handouts with pictures of the anger Iceberg to keep at home as a reminder to use accurate expression when they feel angry with their children.

Accurate expression and validation increase the likelihood of emotion regulation for parents; however, developmentally, children may not be capable of providing validation when they feel emotionally aroused. They may need their parents to help them calm down, which may involve modeling emotion regulation. In general, parents are constantly feeling invalidated by children, who need time to develop empathy and be able to understand what another person feels. Validation is a way to show understanding, take a person seriously, accept emotions without judgments, and let a person feel and think their genuine emotions and thoughts. Parents work to demonstrate validation with their children; however, the proportion of validation the children receive from their parents is incompatible with the validation the parents receive from their children. Parents need to constantly remind themselves about developmental differences, using cognitive emotion regulation, which is challenging when people are exhausted and ashamed of themselves.

Fruzzetti (2013) described self-validation techniques for parents to use to decrease emotional arousal when they feel angry. The self-validation process has three steps: (a) using mindfulness nonjudgmentally to observe and describe feelings and thoughts, not necessarily believing that every thought is true, and accurately identifying primary emotions; (b) using radical acceptance-willingness to not only accept, but also respect one’s own emotions, thoughts, and feelings; and (c) changing the way a person reacts to themselves-normalize negative emotions instead of judging oneself, nurture and support oneself, treat oneself as someone who is suffering and needs compassion. Self-validation can help a parent experiencing burnout to cope with feeling shame that is a part of the PBA scale of contrast. Shame contains self-judgment that increases the intensity of negative emotions. Self-validation aids in moving away from judgments to self-acceptance, which raises awareness of negative emotions. Awareness of emotions is a necessary step in accurate expression and subsequent emotion regulation (Fruzzetti & Payne, 2020).

Limitations and Recommendations for Future Research

Social desirability may have influenced participants’ responses regarding anger experience and expression, as the researchers obtained data through self-report. Additionally, the internal consistency for the distancing scale of PBA was low. Furthermore, the average age of a child in this sample was approximately 5 years old. Thus, the results of this study may not be generalizable to parents with adolescents.

Future studies may involve an observation of parental anger expression on behalf of other family members to control for the effect of self-report. Additionally, future research on parental burnout may focus on the effectiveness of emotion regulation techniques in counseling parents. This may include examining the effect of self-validation on anger experience and expression among parents with different levels of burnout. Other areas for research include investigating the relationship between parental burnout and sociomoral emotions, such as shame, guilt, and embarrassment. Researchers may also focus on comparing parental burnout between mothers and fathers, as well as for parents with different ages of children, and those from more diverse racial and ethnic groups. Finally, researchers may examine the possible relationship between parental burnout and the relationship status of a parent (i.e., having a partner), which may influence burnout and evoke negative emotions toward children.

Conclusion

This study was the first known research to examine the relationship between parental burnout and anger. Continued research may further aid in understanding the relationship between parental burnout and emotional experiences. Counselors can use this information to educate parents about self-validation and accurate expression of emotions to work towards decreasing burnout and developing emotion regulation of anger, which may yield positive outcomes for both parents and their children.