Understanding Parental Burnout
Recognising and Addressing the Struggle of Parent Burnout
Parenting can be exhausting, we invest so much time, energy, and emotional investment. While parenting can be joyful, the challenges can sometimes lead to parental burnout. Parental burnout involves overwhelming stress, exhaustion, and a sense of emotional depletion, can have effects on both parents and their children.
As a parenting coach, I can explore what parental burnout is, it’s potential causes, signs, and provide you with strategies to address and prevent it.
A big part of the work I do with clients is about managing the mental load and helping my clients to simplify their lives.
Defining Parental Burnout
Parental burnout is a state of chronic physical and emotional exhaustion resulting from the relentlessness of parenting. It goes beyond the normal, occasional stress that parents experience and can have lasting effects on their well-being. Parents with children of any age can find themself feeling burnt out.
Causes of Parental Burnout
High Expectations: Unrealistic expectations of oneself as a parent or societal pressure to meet certain standards can lead to burnout. Striving for perfection in parenting can be exhausting.
Lack of Support: Limited support from a partner, family, or friends can leave parents feeling isolated and overwhelmed. The absence of a reliable support system can be stressful.
Work-Life Balance: Parenting can be a juggle the responsibilities of work and parenting can be a lot. Parents who struggle to find a balance between professional and family life may experience burnout.
Financial Pressures: Financial strain can add so much stress to parenting, as the worry about providing for a family can be emotionally draining.
Child's Needs: Children with special needs, neurodiversity or challenging behaviours may require extra attention and care, increasing the demands on parents.
Highly Sensitive Parents: Often people can get by with being highly sensitive before children but the sensory over stimulation of parenting and the challenges of potentially having highly sensitive children too can create overwhelm.
Signs of Parental Burnout
Chronic Fatigue: Feeling constantly tired, even after a full night's sleep, can be a sign of burnout.
Emotional Distancing: Parents experiencing burnout may emotionally detach from their children or feel a sense of indifference needing to hire often.
Decreased Performance: A decline in work or presence as a parent may indicate burnout, as exhaustion affects one's ability to meet daily demands.
Increased Irritability: A shorter fuse and heightened irritability can be indicative of burnout, as the parent feels depleted. Everything feels triggering and high stakes.
Neglecting Self-Care: Parents experiencing burnout may neglect their own self-care and be living in a state of being under resourced and overstretched.
Addressing and Preventing Parental Burnout
Parental burnout is a serious issue that can impact the whole family. Parents who recognise that they are suffering from burn out need support, solidarity, to prioritise self-care, and communicate openly to build resilience and start enjoying parenting again. t
How Conscious Parent Coaching Can Help if You are Struggling With Parental Burnout
If parenthood is causing you to feel burnt out then you should consider conscious parenting.
Prioritisation according to you values
Simplifying your life
Resourcing and regulating your nervous system
Getting very clear on your practical boundaries and your emotional bounraries
Creating systems and frameworks in the home that do the heavy lifting so the parent doesn't have to be in conflict with the child
Somatic healing. As well as being a Conscious Parenting Coach I am a trained Somatic Therapist. Exploring overwhelm in the body and grounding through resource can be helpful ways of soothing the overwhelm in parenting burnout.
Conscious parenting, is about optimising the times when we are triggered by our children as opportunities for personal growth. Parenting is leadership and as a parenting coach, I help parents rise into benevolent, confident leaders. I help them to raise empowered, emotionally intelligent children who thrive. Clients who work with me get sustainable, long term, expansive transformation and most importantly my coaching approach is about increasing connection and finding flow, ease and joy within family life.
So if you have been suffering from parental burnout and would like to find out more about How Parent Coaching Works and see what parents are saying, get in touch.
What Clients are Saying
“I loved what a safe space the Anger course with Emily was. I was turning up as a parent who struggled with anger amongst other parents who struggled with anger who all wanted to make a change. It felt like a space of non judgement and acceptance”
Kate D
“Such an interesting and useful course. I’ve come away having learnt more about myself and with tangible tools I can use in the moment”
Maria P