I am not the parent I should be: Cross-sectional and prospective associations between parental self-discrepancies and parental burnout

ABSTRACT

Because research has shown systematic associations between self-discrepancies and several psychological disorders, self-discrepancy is considered as a transdiagnostic factor in psychopathology. The current research contributes to the literature by testing both cross-sectionally and longitudinally the role of self-discrepancies in parental burnout, an exhaustion disorder in the parenting domain where standards are high and prescriptions numerous. In three studies (including a prospective one; N₁ = 109, N₂ = 1689, N_{3 Third measurement time} = 553 parents), we showed that self-discrepancies are strongly associated with parental burnout, and Study 3 showed that they even predict rank-order increases in such burnout. These results have implications for research on self-discrepancies, parental burnout and psychopathology more broadly.

KEYWORDS:

• Gap
• self
• exhaustion
• psychopathology
• psychological disorder

Disclosure statement

M.M. and I.R. founded the Training Institute for Parental Burnout (TIPB) which delivers training on PB to professionals. The TIPB was founded after the completion of the study. The institute did not participate in the funding of this study nor did it influence the process or the results in any manner.

Data availability statement

All data are available on Open Science Framework (https://osf.io/5u6h2/)

Notes

1. Nomothetic measures are based on a general listing of possible adjectives that are rated by participants to establish actual, ideal and ought self-discrepancies.

2. In idiographic measures, participants generate lists of attributes that describe the person they believe they actually are, would ideally like to be or ought to be.

3. In this study, we relied on traditional cross-lagged panel analyses because these analyses allow for an estimation of rank-order change. As explained in the Introduction, we were indeed primarily interested in the question whether parents who experience relatively higher levels of burnout than other parents would display a rank-order increase in self-discrepancies across time (and vice versa). However, these longitudinal associations can also be examined at the level of within-person change. Therefore, we also tested our model using random-intercepts cross-lagged analyses (Hamaker et al., 2015). Detailed results from this model are available on Open Science Framework (https://osf.io/5u6h2/). Results from the random-intercepts model were quite different from the results obtained with the traditional cross-lagged model. Whereas the traditional cross-lagged model mainly showed systematic longitudinal effects from parental burnout to self-discrepancies, the random-intercepts yielded only few significant effects. The only significant paths were from guilt associated with discrepancy at T1 to parental burnout and actual discrepancy at T2. A within-person elevation of guilt at T1 predicted within-person increases in parental burnout and experiences of increased discrepancy between T1 and T2. These paths did not replicate between T2 and T3. The observation that findings obtained at the level of rank-order change are different from findings obtained at the level of within-person change is consistent with previous research showing that these two levels of change are essentially orthogonal (Dietvorst et al., 2018; Keijsers, 2015). Still, these findings underscore the need to replicate the current findings and to further examine the bidirectionality of associations between parental burnout and self-discrepancies at both the level of rank-order change and at the level of within-person variation in future research.

Additional information

Funding

These studies were funded by a Special Research Fund granted to the first and last author [FSR-2016] by UCLouvain.