111: Parental Burn Out

Do you often feel anxious or irritated, especially when you're around your child? Do you often feel like you might snap, perhaps even threatening violence if they don't do what you say? Are you so disconnected from them that you sometimes consider walking out and never coming back? If you have, it's possible that you're suffering from parental burnout. Listener Kelly reached out to me recently because she has been diagnosed with parental burnout and wanted to know what research is available on this topic, and on how to protect her two-year-old from its impacts. We did some searching around in the literature and it actually didn't take long to turn up the preeminent researchers in the field who actually work as a team and one of whom - Dr. Moira Mikolajczak, kindly agreed to talk with us. We learned about the warning signs to watch out for that indicate that you might be suffering from parental burnout, and what to do about it if you are. We ran a bit over time at the end of the episode and I wasn't able to ask about whether self-compassion might be a useful tool for coping with parental burnout but Dr. Mikolajczak and I emailed afterward and she agreed that it is - I'm hoping to do an episode on self-compassion in the future.   More information on Dr. Mikolajczak's work on parental burnout can be found at https://www.burnoutparental.com/ The Parental Burnout Assessment, available in French and English, can be found here: https://en.burnoutparental.com/suis-je-en-burnout   Taming Your Triggers If you need help with your own big feelings about your child’s behavior, Taming Your Triggers workshop is now open. We’ll help you to: Understand the real causes of your triggered feelings, and begin to heal the hurts that cause them Use new tools like the ones Katie describes to find ways to meet both her and her children’s needs Effectively repair with your children on the fewer instances when you are still triggered It’s a 10-week workshop with one module delivered every week, an amazing community of like-minded parents, a match with an AccountaBuddy to help you complete the workshop, and mini-mindfulness practices to re-ground yourself repeatedly during your days, so you’re less reactive and more able to collaborate with your children. Sign up for the waitlist and we'll let you know once enrollment re-opens. Click the image below to learn more.       [accordion] [accordion-item title="Click here to read the full transcript"] Jen  01:45 So let's meet the people we're talking with today. First up is listener Kelly, who is enrolled in the Taming Your Triggers workshop and who reached out to us whether I'd be interested in doing this episode on Burnout since she's been experiencing it for several months. Kelly is a postdoctoral researcher in the health field in the Netherlands and wanted to know more about how her experience of burnout is impacting her daughter. After we found the leading researchers on this topic, Kelly graciously agreed to join me as a co-interviewer even though she's an introvert like me and is a little bit nervous about doing it. Welcome, Kelly.  ...