The emotional cost of parental burnout

TThe holidays can knock down almost everyone. For parents of young children, the pressure can be especially intense: They must balance the high expectations that come with tinsel season with the demands of caring for their little ones and the stress of other family commitments and conflicts, like finding the perfect gift for Great-Aunt Kate. This can easily lead to burnout.

Parental burnout can lead to a litany of other problems: mental health problems and sleep disorders, interference with family functioning and childhood development, marital distress and parental neglect, according to psychological research. Scientists therefore want to understand how it works. To this end, an international team of researchers from Europe and the United States recently took a close look at the relationship between parental burnout and the ability to be emotionally authentic, predicting that it would be a two-way street.

Working with almost 300 parents in the UK over the 2023-2024 Christmas holiday period, the scientists first recorded baseline levels of burnout and genuine emotional expression in parents, all of whom had at least one child under the age of 10. They then followed them intensively for 35 days during the holidays. Several times a day, parents received phone messages asking them about their level of burnout and their true emotional expression at the moment. They also followed the parents after the holidays and used a statistical approach to analyze differences in each parent’s functioning over time, differences between parents, and whether one condition predicted the next.

Read more: “How big is your family”

The scientists’ initial hypothesis was only half right: When parents felt more exhausted than usual, they were more likely to report being less emotionally authentic with their children during the next check-in, suggesting that burnout may make it harder to show how one really feels in the moment. But the reverse was not true: genuine emotional expression did not predict later levels of burnout. Another key finding: Holidays can be more difficult for mothers than for their partners; During the follow-up period, they reported higher levels of burnout than fathers. The team published its findings in Communication psychology.

This major finding came as a surprise, because psychologists have found in previous work that authentic expression helps conserve emotional resources, that is, it takes less mental effort to be authentic than to hide one’s feelings. But the benefits of being real for children and parents may depend on the parent’s ability to express real emotions skillfully, the authors note.

Burnout and emotional authenticity were sticky. Parents who started the season more exhausted tended to have higher burnout on average throughout the month, and their burnout also persisted more from moment to moment. But the parents were very varied. Parents with higher burnout experienced a more difficult emotional time throughout the season, while those who were more authentic to begin with were generally more stable in this regard. The main indicator of parental health status at follow-up was the average level of burnout during the season.

All of this is a good reminder to parents to be kind to themselves. Glitter season can cause many people to perform instead of connect, and that can clearly have serious consequences.

Enjoy Nautilus? Subscribe for free to our newsletter.

Main image: OlhaTsiplyar / Shutterstock

• Kristen French

  Published on December 30, 2025

  Kristen French is an associate editor at Nautilus. She has worked in science journalism since 2013, reporting and writing articles and news for publications such as Wired, Backchannel, The Verge, And New York Review. She holds a master’s degree in science journalism from Columbia University.