0000000001223902

AUTHOR

Géraldine Dorard

Gender Equality and Maternal Burnout: A 40-Country Study

International audience; In Western countries, recent decades have witnessed a revolution toward gender equality. Inequalities have been greatly reduced in areas such as education or employment. Because inequalities lead to distress, this development has largely benefited women. One notable exception is the realm of parenting, which has remained rife with inequalities even in the most egalitarian countries. We hypothesized that experiencing inequality in parenting when one holds egalitarian values and raising a child in a country characterized by a high level of gender equality in other areas, increases mothers’ psychological distress in the specific area of parenting. Multilevel modeling an…

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Parenting culture(s): Ideal-parent beliefs across 37 countries

What is it to be “an ideal parent”? Does the answer differ across countries and social classes? To answer these questions in a way that minimizes bias and ethnocentrism, we used open-ended questions to explore ideal-parent beliefs among 8,357 mothers and 3,517 fathers from 37 countries. Leximancer Semantic Network Analysis was utilized to first determine parenting culture zones (i.e., countries with shared ideal-parent beliefs) and then extract the predominant themes and concepts in each culture zone. The results yielded specific types of ideal-parent beliefs in five parenting culture zones: being “responsible and children/family-focused” for Asian parents, being “responsible and proper de…

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Profiles of Parental Burnout Around the Globe : Similarities and Differences Across 36 Countries

Parental burnout (PB) is a pervasive phenomenon. Parenting is embedded in cultural values, and previous research has shown the role of individualism in PB. In this paper, we reanalyze previously collected data to identify profiles based on the four dimensions of PB, and explore whether these profiles vary across countries’ levels of collectivistic-individualistic (COL-IND) values. Our sample comprised 16,885 individuals from 36 countries (73% women; 27% men), and we used a latent profile approach to uncover PB profiles. The findings showed five profiles: Fulfilled, Not in PB, Low risk of PB, High risk of PB and Burned out. The profiles pointed to climbing levels of PB in the total sample an…

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Parental Burnout Across the Globe During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Abstract. The COVID-19 pandemic has affected all societies worldwide. The heightened levels of stress that accompanied the crisis were also expected to affect parenting in many families. Since it is known that high levels of stress in the parenting domain can lead to a condition that has severe consequences for health and well-being, we examined whether the prevalence of parental burnout in 26 countries (9,923 parents; 75% mothers; mean age 40) increased during COVID-19 compared to few years before the pandemic. In most (but not all) countries, analyses showed a significant increase in the prevalence of parental burnout during the pandemic. The results further revealed that next to governm…

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