The confinement conditions in which millions of family parents had to combine their professional activities with the care of their children, finally passed invoice, with profound exhaustion.
This is stated by 66% of the parents who work in the United States, which are overwhelmed by the stress caused by distance education, lack of childcare, social isolation and, if outside little, economic instability.
The data comes from a report by researchers at the Ohio State University in which the term “exhaustion” was coined. of the parents”, a non-clinical term that denotes certain physical and emotional states caused by two years of the pandemic.
In a nutshell, parental burnout refers to a condition in which working parents feel “empty “, without nothing more than they can give to their children or those around them.
To reach these conclusions, the researchers surveyed 1 online,285 working parents, between January 2021 and April of the same year. The results were published last Thursday.
The conditions of the parents who participated in the survey were very different from the current ones due to the strict confinements that were then in force in the United States.
However, in a text published by
The New York Times (NYT), it is ensured that the exhaustion of the parents will not disappear, since these people do not have sufficient structural support to leave their stress behind.
“The chronicity of the pandemic has taken a toll and has exhausted the coping reserves of many parents that will require time and patience to accumulate again,” said Bernadette Melnyk, dean of the Ohio State College of Nursing and author of the report for the NYT.
The so-called burnout of parents is a cluster of symptoms that can be associated with work and that could be a subtype of the known burnout, a physical and emotional phenomenon that the World Organization of Health does acknowledge.
In recent weeks, another study revealed that 53% of working women feel more stressed than a year ago, in a phenomenon associated with burnout.
“As with burnout, parental burnout is defined as physical, emotional, and mental exhaustion due to the constant demands of childcare”, explained Jennifer Yen, psychiatrist at UTHealth Houston, in an interview with NYT.
Parents experiencing this type of burnout are likely to exhibit one or more of these symptoms.
-Fatigue
-Irritability
-Changes in sleep
-Changes in appetite
-Changes in mood
-Pain
-Discomfort
However, suffering one or more of these symptoms does not constitute the so-called exhaustion of the parents, but rather this occurs with its severity and how they affect functioning in daily life.
According to Dr. Yen, emotionally, parents who suffer from it may begin to feel angry or resentful about caring for children, isolating themselves from them, physically or emotionally, and feeling trapped.
The new study specifically prepared for parents, so that they have a tool that helps them identify on a scale with scores so that they understand if their exhaustion is mild, moderate or severe.
You may also be interested in:
– Why to avoid a recession, supply problems must be solved, according to Fed officials
– The price of avocado hits all-time highs in the US: box sells for up to $78 dollars
– United States adds 428,000 new jobs in April and shows that the labor market remains strong