An ACT Approach to Parental Burnout

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Parental burnout is a condition that can result from chronic parenting stress. Symptoms of parental burnout can include:

  • Exhaustion in one’s parental role
  • Feeling disconnected with your past self
  • Feeling fed up with parenting, and Emotional distancing from your children

Researchers have found that parents are at greatest risk of burnout when they aim to be perfect parents, lack emotion and stress management abilities, and/or have children with special needs that interfere with family life. For many of these risk-factors, the addition of the current pandemic makes for a strong recipe for increased rates of parental burnout.

isa Coyne, PhD and Evelyn Gould, PhD, BCBA-D recently presented a webinar that focused on strategies for parents dealing with the struggles presented by the COVID-19 pandemic and shelter-in-place orders using an Acceptance & Commitment Therapy (ACT) approach. If you are not familiar, in short, ACT is a form of counseling and a branch of clinical behavior analysis (just like ABA). It is an empirically-based psychological intervention that uses acceptance and mindfulness strategies mixed in different ways with commitment and behavior-change strategies, to increase psychological flexibility. Below are some considerations and strategies that Drs. Coyne and Gould provide for parents dealing with the current struggles presented by the pandemic and shelter-in-place orders.

What Is Parental Burnout?

Parental burnout is like job burnout in that they both result from something that is important to you or something you really care about. However, parental burnout is different than job burnout in that you cannot quit or change your position as a parent. Nevertheless, parental burnout can result in feeling fed up with parenting. It is a prolonged response to chronic and overwhelming parent stress.
What Can You Do?

  • Engage in self-compassion: Parents are often called to care for others, but parents need to care for themselves as well. Be willing to accept imperfections and don’t forget to take care of yourself.
  • Start where you are: Pause and take a reset. Perhaps your child had a prolonged tantrum. Make room for accepting that frustrating event and begin again from a clean slate going forward rather than ruminating on the incident.
  • Let yourself off the hook: There is no manual for how parents should handle the COVID -19 crisis. Be gentle to yourself and have an understanding that having unwanted feelings such as worry is okay.

ACT Practices You Can Add:

  1. Stop and breathe: Take time to pause and notice where you are emotionally. Here is an awareness meditation that can help parents take a step back from the struggles of parenting and reset themselves.
  2. Defuse from your thoughts: Minds are evolutionarily built to be quick to judge. If our minds were always laid back and calm, humans wouldn’t have survived this long. The downside is that you can’t turn off the mind (ever notice that the more you try to not worry about something, the more it appears?).

    3. Here is an exercise to help defuse from your thoughts:

    Think of a negative thought (i.e.: “I’m a bad parent”), add “I am having the thought that I’m a bad parent, then add “I am noticing that I am having the thought that I’m a bad parent”, add “I’m aware that I am noticing, that I’m having the thought that I’m a bad parent”.

    Notice the distance between the thought compared to the bite it felt at the beginning of the exercise. This is a small ACT practice you can implement when you are spinning on a thought and can be useful when having a hard time with your child.

  3. Choose how to respond: Two core tenets of ACT are the “observing self” and “committed actions”. This short practice touches on both processes:

    4. Fast forward 10 years from now, think about how old your kids will be then, where you might be in life, and imagine talking about the pandemic with your kids. What would you want your kids to remember? How would you want them to remember you as a parent? What would you want to give to your kids during those days?

Remember, you cannot control the effects of the COVID-19 crisis, but you can choose how to respond to it. Choose now as a parent to be able to look back on this experience proudly, and remember, you do not need to be perfect.

Reference

Praxis TV. (2020, May 13). An ACT approach to parental burnout. Youtube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uW5I_bX-7hk

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