Psychologists the world over are warning that chronic parental stress can lead to burnout with disastrous consequences for children – Jayalakshmi Vaidyanathan & Mini P. “Parental stress is a distinct type of stress that arises when a parent’s perception of the demands of parenting outstrip his or her resources.” — Carina Coulacoglou & Donald H. Saklofske (Psychometrics and Psychological Assessment, 2017) Most parents are unaware that high stress they experience juggling household chores, child rearing duties, children’s school and co-curricular activities schedules, the workplace, friends and family daily, is now a classified mental health condition. Psychologists the world over are warning that chronic parental stress can lead to burnout with disastrous consequences for children. In the new era of all-pervasive social media, the pressure millennial parents experience to live up to media glorification of super-parents has intensified. A 2018 survey of 2,000 parents by the well-known Michigan-based breakfast food/cereals multinational Kellogg Company, found that parents clock the equivalent of a full day’s work (ten hours) per week getting their children ready for school. The total number of routine tasks a parent performs every morning adds up to 43, including supervising children’s morning wash and getting them ready for school, packing the school lunch, commuting and even uttering the words “hurry up” more than 500 times per year. Rakhi Vashist, a Bangalore-based fashion industry professional and mother of a 15-year-old, is conscious of the price of multi-tasking which is draining her and adversely affecting her physical well-being and workplace productivity. “I am becoming increasingly aware of the toll extracted by never-ending parenting duties and its impact on my professional work. Now with my son writing the class X boards, I am experiencing greater than ever pressure of being the ideal, supportive mother. The onus that he prepares and performs well in the boards is as much on me as on him. This is a time of high stress and fatigue,” says Vashist. According to a 2017 study published in Frontiers in Psychology, 2-12 percent of parents suffer parental burnout, defined as a “unique and context-specific syndrome resulting from enduring exposure to chronic parenting stress”. The study differentiates parenting stress from depression which affects every facet of an individual’s persona. Parental burnout adversely affects parenting duties execution capabilities. Typical symptoms include exhaustion, fatigue, exasperation and emotional distancing from children. In particular, within India’s stubbornly patriarchal society where child rearing continues to exclusively remain “women’s work”, mothers are expected to be primary care-givers tasked with nappy-changing, school drops, laundry, and cooking. They are obliged to assume the lead role in nurturing children through early childhood, adolescence into adulthood. Unsurprisingly, maternal stress is ubiquitous and visible. Dr. Satish Ramaiah, consultant neuro-psychiatrist and sleep disorders specialist at the People Tree Hospitals, Bangalore, opines that in latter-day nuclear households with gadget-dependent children, parenting stress has aggravated. “The breakdown of the joint family and multiplication of nuclear households with both parents work ing has intensified parenting pressure on women who are finding it increasingly difficult to balance parenting and…
