Actualidades en Psicología, 36 (133), July-December, 2022, 100-117
DOI: 10.15517/ap.v36i133.41153
ISSN 2215-3535
Universidad de Costa Rica
www.revistas.ucr.ac.cr/index.php/actualidades
Toward a Possible Reassessment of Causes and Protecting Strategies
Underlying the Dynamic of Parental Burnout in Costa Rica
Acerca de una posible reevaluación de las causas y estrategias de protección
subyacentes a la dinámica del desgaste parental en Costa Rica
Javier Tapia Balladares 1
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6499-4898
Alejandra Rodríguez Villalobos3
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7225-6791
Jorge Sanabria León 2
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2530-5770
Instituto de Investigaciones Psicológicas, Universidad de Costa Rica, Costa Rica
Escuela de Psicología, Universidad de Costa Rica, Costa Rica
3
Departamento de Psicología, Sede de Occidente, Universidad de Costa Rica, Costa Rica
1
2
1
javier.tapiaballadares@ucr.ac.cr
2
jorge.sanabria@ucr.ac.cr
3
alejandra.rodriguez_v@ucr.ac.cr
Received: April 21, 2020. Accepted: November 2, 2022
Abstract. Objective.This study aims to reach an initial understanding of some specific cultural characteristics of
parental burnout in Costa Rica. The findings stem from analyzing specific family configurations of parental burnout during parenting. Method. An intentional sample of 146 mothers and 102 fathers (n= 248, mean age 37)
was selected. They completed a questionnaire regarding socio-demographics, Parental burnout assessment,
Gender roles, Independent-interdependent Self, Involvement in parental function and duties, and the Parental
goals and values. Results. there is a low prevalence of parental burnout and an average level of individualism in
parenting. Although the study failed to identify high degrees of parental burnout in the Costa Rican sampled
parents, which tend to be rather moderate or low in comparison with other countries, there seems to be an initial tendency of some type of family toward increasing burnout as well as noteworthy traits of familial dynamics
that might function as mitigating or even protective factors against parental burnout.
Keywords. IIPB, Parental Burnout, PBA, Gender, Costa Rica
Resumen. Objetivo. Avanzar en la comprensión de las características culturales específicas del agotamiento
parental en Costa Rica al analizar configuraciones familiares específicas del agotamiento parental durante la
crianza. Método. Se seleccionó una muestra intencional de 146 madres y 102 padres con una media de edad de
37 años. Los participantes completaron un cuestionario que indagó en variables sociodemográficas y las medidas parental burnout assessment, Gender Roles, Independent-interdependent Self, Involvement in parental
Function and Duties y Parental Goals and Values. Resultados. Una baja prevalencia de agotamiento parental y
un rol importante del individualismo moderado en la crianza. Se concluye que, aunque no se logró detectar un
alto grado de agotamiento parental en la muestra de padres y madres, quienes mostraron moderados y bajos
niveles de agotamiento en comparación con otros países. Se halló una tendencia inicial hacia un aumento del
agotamiento en algunos tipos de familia, además de dinámicas familiares que parecen funcionar como factores
atenuantes e incluso protectores contra al agotamiento parental.
Palabras clave. IIPB, agotamiento parental, PBA, género, Costa Rica
Esta obra está bajo una licencia de Creative Commons Reconocimiento-NoComercial-SinObraDerivada 4.0 Internacional.
Parental Burnout in Costa Rica
cioeconomic/psychosocial scaffold supporting the
family, and even those resources supplied by the
socio-environment, do not necessary represent risk
of protection on their own. It is not the absence or
presence of factors that ensues in stressful conditions, but the likely shift of each factor from low to
high scores and vice versa, as well as the entanglement of all the factors in the familial relationship system as in the individual measures accounted for.
To integrate such a perspective, the measures of the
risk/protection factors should underscore size and
weight of each factor to determine different grades of balance or imbalance, i. e., if measures of
protection compensate, equal, or outnumber risk or
the other way around. Thus, parental burnout will
be the result of interlocking risk and protection, as
proposed by Mikolajczak and Roskam (2018), whose
findings suggest operationalizing parental burnout
as a linear function of the balance between risks
and resources.
However, for a full comprehension of parental
burnout the model should include culturally sensitive risk/resource factors in each social context to
be researched.
On the other hand, parental burnout could be
harmful to parent´s well-being and parental practices
alike, therefore affecting parent-child interaction and
child development when the stressors last or even
become chronic by weakening the psychological
resources to cope with the burden of child-rearing
and family life (Mikolajczak et al., 2018). The three
dimensions those authors conceive to conceptualize
parental burnout comprise, first, overwhelming exhaustion since parents experience their role as too
demanding and tiring in everyday life. Second, arousal of emotional distancing from their children that
diminishes the quality of interactions. Third, a sense
of ineffectiveness that undermines parental skills to
cope with daily parenting challenges.
The main component that ensues the fundamental dimension of parental burnout is the condition of being exhausted, which is a feeling of
lacking physical or emotional resources to assimi-
Introduction
The way parents deal with the daily challenge of
raising their offspring is seen by most researchers as
the needed equilibrium between the childrearing burden and the level of satisfaction while being in
this role on an everyday basis. As a matter of basic
conceptual framework that enables psychology to
compare diverse cultural determinants of this contemporary phenomenon in the globalizing world
nowadays, the model of the balance between risks
and resources has been proposed by Mikolajczak
and Roskam (2018). The authors posit that a bent
toward one end of this basal structure will determine the degree of success or failure in confronting
the psychological demands involved hereto.
While extensive research has been conducted
on job burnout (more than 23,000 studies to date),
parental burnout has only very recently become the
focus of scientific interest (see Pelsma et al., 1989, as
the sole exception before 2007). Therefore, there is
still a dearth of empirical evidence about how parenting stress leads eventually to parental burnout
(Glasberg et al., 2007; Lindström et al., 2010; Norberg et al., 2014).
The main subject to be discussed is how routine parenting asks can psychologically overwhelm
parents to the extent that the quality of the familial
relationship system decreases, and the stress level
grows out of control at least to a certain point. Under
these circumstances, each member of the family, as
well as the entire familial psychological atmosphere, suffers the consequences of living in a negative
emotional overloaded relationship, compromising
mostly the psychological development of growing
children thereafter. Parents’ most frequent reactions
toward children tend to oscillate between neglect
and violence, whereas the couple faces increasing
conflicts (Mikolajczak et al., 2019).
An additional aspect that should be considered
is the valence of the factors involved in the process.
Presence or absence of certain traits in the psychological dynamic within the family or of the so-
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late the burden of parenting (Roskam et al., 2017).
Parental burnout is a unique and context-specific
syndrome resulting from a chronic imbalance of
risks over resources in the parenting domain (Manrique-Millones, et al., 2022).
More specifically, the three dimensions of parental burnout comprise, first, overwhelming exhaustion related to one’s parental role: parents feel
that being a parent requires too much involvement;
they feel tired when getting up in the morning and
having to face another day with their children; they
feel emotionally drained by the parental role to
the extent that thinking about their role as parents
makes them feel they have reached the end of
their tether. Second, an emotional distancing from
their children: exhausted parents become less and
less involved in the upbringing of and relationship
with their children; they do the bare minimum for
their children but no more; interactions are limited
to functional/instrumental aspects at the expense
of emotional aspects. Third, a sense of ineffectiveness in the parental role: parents feel that they
cannot handle problems calmly and/or effectively.
As shown recently by Roskam et al. (2017), parental
burnout is a unique syndrome, empirically distinct
from job burnout, parental stress, or depression.
Research on parental burnout is still scarce, but
studies up to date have shown that it can be reliably measured (Roskam et al., 2017), that it concerns
both mothers and fathers (Lindström et al., 2010;
Roskam et al., 2017), that its prevalence (between
8% and 36% depending on the types of parents
studied; Lindström et al., 2010; Roskam et al., 2017)
warrants further investigation, that it is related to
sociodemographic, situational, personal, parental,
and marital factors (Le Vigouroux et al., 2017; Mikolajczak et al., 2018), and that it has specific consequences in terms of child-related outcomes, i.e.,
neglect and violence, and in terms of escapist and
suicidal thoughts (Mikolajczak et al., 2018; Roskam
et al., 2021).
The current study adds to the purpose of the International Investigation of Parental Burnout (IIPB),
which is to test the conceptual validity, prevalence,
and intercultural variation of parental burnout in different cultures around the world. Henceforth, an
international consortium has been initiated by Professors Isabelle Roskam and Moïra Mikolajczak in
collaboration with Maday Valdes Pacheco (see the
main study: Roskam et al., 2021).
Although parental burnout appears to be a
psychosocial concern in developing countries like
Costa Rica that assimilates much of the emerging
practices of raising children in a modern society
style and widening unexpected challenges hereto could be present unannounced, the study has
been presented to the participating parents under the title “Factors in parental satisfaction and
exhaustion around the world”. The term “parental
burnout” has not been used to avoid sampling and
social desirability biases.
The international project aims at reaching conceptual validity and at testing intercultural variability of the parental burnout construct in different
contexts around the world.
Therefore, the main objective of the current
study is to gather data about parental burnout
amid families from the Costa Rican Central Valley.
Middle class families were interviewed which with
at least one child under one roof were interviewed.
Thereby, the study strives to highlight the culturally specific characteristics of the parental burnout.
Specific familial configurations of parental burnout,
extreme fatigue, emotional detachment, and lack of
efficacy are brought to bear. Of particular interest
are the likely variations of parental burnout within
families, i.e., intracultural dissimilarity. According
to Rosabal-Coto et al. (2017), the most common
world-wide child-rearing model establishes that
the burden and responsibility of this task lies on
intensive mothering, which demands that mothers
to put their own life on hold to devote themselves
to a child-centering parenting. This statement leads
us to assume that the parental burnout tends to
appear more frequently in the maternal rearing role
and not in the father’s participation.
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Título corto Título corto Título corto Título
In this sense, Suárez et al. (2022) have recently
questioned the general approach of the PBA ever
since the results of the international study came
out (see Bornstein, 2020). The study centers on
the concern regarding the cultural sensitivity of the
PBA. The most important issue Suárez et al. (2022)
are questioning refers to what they call “a variable
centered approach”, whose validity lies on the four
factors’ direct scores (p. 3). In their review of the
international results, they suggest switching to a
“person-centered approach (that) can provide an
ecological and realistic perspective” (p. 3). Hence,
they apply a Latent Profile Analysis to address the
data from this perspective to contrast with Roskam
et al. (2017) analysis.
Our first hypothesis claims that parental burnout
rates arise among the mothers of the sample but
not among fathers. A second hypothesis points
toward parental burnout as a socioemotional risk
factor for mothers, but not necessarily for fathers.
Our rationale underlying these two hypothesis is
based on the maternal child-centered parenting as
the most common rearing practice. A third hypothesis stresses the role of differentiated cultural
practices that may function either as a protective
or a risk factor to parental burnout, being individualism a risk factor versus collectivism a protective
one, since individualism exerts a greater burden on
parents, whereas traditional practices such as wider
familial involvement may relate to a stronger support strategy.
Method
This is a correlational study based on Likert Scales measures for the most part.
Participants
The participants consisted of 248 parents among
which 146 are mothers and 102 fathers. The mean
age for fathers is 41 and for mothers is 35, with a
total mean age of 37 years old. The selection criteria consisted in recruiting mothers and fathers with
a male or female child residing under one single
roof. Sample’s education level is high since average
of formal education is 16 years hence universitary
level. They reside mostly in the Great Metropolitan
Area of San Jose, the capital of Costa Rica, but also
in the San Ramón County, in the northern province
of Alajuela, as well as in mid-country. Besides, some
participants are from the provinces of Alajuela, Cartago and Heredia, also mid-country with high urbanization standards and basic social services.
Participants were recruited in education centers
for children and in mental health centers for adults.
Some other participants were recruited in police
departments and two were private entrepreneurs
by word of mouth. Besides, researchers and assistants were recruited through personal Facebook
pages and one from a political party. The research
project was submitted to and approved by the Ethical Scientific Committee of the University of Costa
Rica (IRB, session number 93, record VI-1071-2018).
Considering the type of family, it was found that
74.8% correspond to two-parent families, 6.9% to
single-parent families, 7.7% to stepfamilies, 7.3% to
multigenerational families and 3.2% to other types
of family structures. Families represented by a single
participant of the sample were excluded from subsequent analyses.
Instruments
Participants completed either a paper-pencil
version of the instruments (10 participants) or an
online version in Lime survey. The online version
generated 1384 incompletes surveys from March 6
to June 25, 2018. 248 individual questionnaires were
collected altogether.
Sociodemographic factors. The 18-item survey
explores diverse sociodemographic factors. It was
created ex profeso for this research project by Isabelle Roskam and coworkers and comprises the following aspects: age, education level in years, type
of family, number of biological children, number of
children living under one single roof, age of the oldest child, age of the youngest child, number of women living in the household who look after children
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daily, number of men living in the household who
look after children daily, ethnicity of the participant,
whether the participant was born in the current
country of residence; type of neighborhood, type
of paid job, whether children stay with their mother
or father during paid job hours and the number of
hours parents spent with their children.
Parental Burnout Assessment PBA (Roskam et
al., 2018; Roskam et al., 2017; 22 items). This scale evaluates the grade of parental burnout in four
dimensions: emotional exhaustion in parental role
(9 items, e. g., “I feel completely run down by my
role as a parent”); contrast in parental self (6 items,
e. g., “I’m no longer proud of myself as a parent”);
feelings of being fed up (5 items, e. g., “I can’t stand
my role as father/mother anymore”); and emotional distancing from one´s children (3 items, e. g., “I
do what I’m supposed to do for my child(ren), but
nothing more”). Items are rated on 7-point Likert
scales: never (0), a few times a year or less (1), once
a month or less (2), a few times a month (3), once
a week (4), a few times a week (5), every day (6).
In the current study, the Cronbach’s Alpha reaches
.93 for emotional exhaustion in parental role; .77 for
emotional distancing from one´s children; .91 for feelings of being fed up.
Gender roles GR (Constantin & Voicu, 2015; 12
items). The GR Scale measures beliefs regarding
appropriate male and female roles. Three main attitudes toward gender roles are to be considered:
traditionalism (4 items; e. g., “In general men are
best political leaders that women”), according to
which women are different but inferior to men; specialist (4 items; e. g., “A job is all right, but what most
women really want is a home and children”), referring to women and men as equal but with different socialization tasks; androgenism (4 items; e. g.,
“Men ought to do a larger share of household work
than they do now”), which rejects women’s inferiority as well as the specialized roles. It is a 7-point
Likert scale from “total disagree” to “total agree”. In
this study, Cronbach’s Alpha reaches traditionalism:
.68; specialist: .66; androgenism: .44.
Independent-interdependent Self IIS. (Singelis, 1994; 30 items). The scale evaluates independent
self-construal (individualism) and interdependent
self-construal (collectivism), assuming that both
tendencies are present simultaneously in people.
According to the author, one of the cultural tendencies of the self will be predominant over the
other, although evidence of the dual self can also be
found. The scale contains items with a 7-point Likert
response scale, where participants choose between
“Totally Agree” and “Totally Disagree” response options. Examples of self-construal independent items
are: “I can talk openly with a person I meet for the
first time, even when this person is much older than
I am” and “I do my own thing, regardless of what
others think”. Some interdependent self-construal
items are: “I will sacrifice my self-interest for the benefit of the group I am in”, and “I feel good when I
cooperate with others”.
Involvement in parental function and duties PF
(Roskam, Valdes, Mikolajczak, 2019; 23 items). This
scale has been developed within the framework of
IIPB and it specifically refers to parental involvement
from an instrumental, observable, and measurable
behavioral point of view. The authors were based
on the Levine’s universal model of parental functions: (a) to ensure the health and survival of the
child; (b) to stimulate the child to ensure his social
and cognitive development adaptation; and (c) to
transmit the values adapted to the child that allows
them to interact adequately inside their ownership
group (Levine, 1977; Roskam et al., 2015). In summary, the scale allows having an overview about to
which extent mothers and fathers are involved in
their parental tasks. According to the authors, the
scale includes three principal factors: Basic needs,
childrearing, and material subsistence.
Parental goals and values GV (Suizzo, 2007; 41
items). This scale measures the relevance parents
give to 41 goals and values by signing their priority for their children’s future life as adults. The GV
scale covers 5 dimensions: tradition and conformity (10 item, e. g., “respect for those who are senior
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to you”); power and achieve (7 item, e. g., “to be
known: get public recognition for achievements”);
relatedness (4 item, e.g. “To have close friends “);
agency and self-direction (11 item, e.g., “to think
for yourself: have your own views even if they differ from those of the others”); benevolence and
prosocial (7 item, e.g., “forgiveness: able to forgive
others”); separateness (2 item, e. g., “autonomy: not
needing anyone’s approval for your decisions”). A
7-point Likert scale reaches from “non-important”
to “most important”. Cronbach’s alpha in the current study reaches tradition and conformity .85;
power and achieve .79; separateness .73; agency
and Self-direction .90; benevolence and prosocial
.90; and Separateness .65.
Procedures
We apply the paper / pencil version at the Wem
Institute of Masculinity and Sexuality. In this institution 12 participants were recruited, 2 of which 2
withdrew. For the online version, a call poster was
posted on Facebook pages such as: pages of friends
and people known by the researcher and research
assistants on Facebook; on Facebook pages from
Coronado and Moravia district and community, in
Northern San José; on the Facebook page from the
“Coalición Costa Rica” political movement; in three
Catholics private high schools and other similar
educational centers; in the “Centro Infantil Gotitas
de Sabiduría” nursery, in the Coronado district; in
the National Police; in the “Centro Infantil Laboratorio” at the University of Costa Rica, Rodrigo Facio
campus; in the “Centro Infantil Laboratorio” at the
University of Costa Rica, Western campus; in the
“General Cable” transnational company, in the Belén district, province of Heredia, Costa Rica; in the
“Double Digit” transnational company, in the Tibas
district, province of San José.
Results
Table 1 shows the main descriptive results for each
scale and subscale.
Parental burnout prevalence
Regarding the prevalence of parental burnout,
the following results were found: 3.04% (n = 5) of
mothers are in burnout, while 6.08% (n = 10) are at
risk condition; in addition, no fathers are in burnout,
while 3.09% (n = 3) is at risk condition. Considering the sample, there is only a 2% prevalence of
parental burnout. Cut-off groups were established
according to the criteria of the authors of the PBA
(Roskam et al., 2018). On one hand, parents who
reached 92 points or more in PBA were defined in
parental burnout condition. They correspond to the
participants displaying at least ⅔ (66%) of all the
symptoms defined in the scale on a daily frequency. On the other hand, parents who displayed ⅔ of
all the symptoms on a few times a week frequency,
reached between 76 and 91 points and they were
defined in risk condition.
These findings deploy the scores in strict comparison to the former studies of reference (specially
Roskam´s) from which the current research departed, and to the stablished statistics standards for the
transnational project is a part of (also Roskam´s).
However, these same results could be viewed from
a cultural perspective and so retreaded from an alternative perspective. Critical hereto is the cut-off
point: maybe that which represents a heavier burden for parents in European countries has not necessarily an equal weight for Costa Rican mothers
or fathers, thus the same issue could have been
scored lower in the current study even though the
intensity of the activity or task is quite similar in both
contexts. In other words, parenting could be objectively equally exhausting but perceived subjectively
different in its relevance among distinctive contexts.
Bearing in mind this likely explanation, let us consider the Kurtosis of the PBA, which is 3.338 with a
Standard Error of .309. This positive value means
heavy tails (i. e., a lot of data in both tails). Such heaviness in the tails depicts the data as a flatter shape
(compared to a normal distribution). The standard
normal distribution has a kurtosis of 3, hence these values are nearly normal or mesokurtic. However,
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Table 1. Descriptives of PBA, PF, GR, IIS, GV scales and subscales
Scale
n
M
SD
Min.
Max.
PBA Exhaustion
247
12.50
11.95
0
52
PBA Constrast
247
4.61
6.43
0
36
PBA Saturation
247
4.29
5.58
0
29
PBA Emotional distancing
247
2.50
3.28
0
18
PBA total score
247
23.91
24.89
0
133
PF Childrearing
247
2.22
0.53
0.36
4
PF Basic needs
247
2.18
0.61
1
4
PF Material subsistence
247
2.08
0.96
0
4
PF mean
247
2.16
0.46
1.03
3.71
GR Traditionalist
247
0.96
1.91
0
30
GR Specialist
247
7.32
5.55
0
30
GR Androgynist
247
19.23
3.90
4
24
IIS Individualism
247
67.21
9.09
38
90
IIS Collectivism
247
52.97
10.55
25
80
GV Tradition & Conformity
171
32.74
7.85
15
50
GV Power & Achievement
171
17.25
6.1
4
35
GV Relatedness
171
7.43
3.77
0
20
GV Agency & Self-direct
171
47.11
6.73
20
55
GV Benevolence & Prosocial
171
26.95
5.44
13
35
GV Separateness
171
7.54
2.03
1
10
Note. PBA = Parental Burnout Assessment, PF = Parental Functions, GR = Gender Roles, IIS =
Independent-Interdependent Self, GV = Parental Goals and Values.
since in a Standard Normal Distribution the Skewness should be 0, the fact of a Skewness of 1.774 with
a Standard Error of .155 is relevant. The mean of the
PBA in this study is 23 and the median is 17, therefore data are right skewed, which means that the data
are negative asymmetrical, i. e., tend to heighten the
media over the median. Hence, the sample barely
tends to score over its own media. The media is only
a point under the percentile 80 and the percentile 90
is 56. However, this panorama may reflect a likely cutoff point for this sample and may be considered as a
referential depiction of how parental burnout looks
like in this context and time for future studies.
When the sample size is reduced to those participants whose scores in each subscale of PBA is
larger than 0, it is possible to better recognize how
the parental burnout is experienced by the parents
that report it up to some degree (Figure 1).
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Figure 1. Boxplot of PAB subscales and total scores
The dots above the media (x) but especially those above the upper whiskers (outliers) point to the
participants whose scores could be considered for
further research as paradigmatic cases of how parental burnout might come about in the Costa Rican familial context.
Another way to estimate how the scores in PBA
may reflect the inner participants´ perception of
parental burnout from a particular cultural point of
view is to transform the score to Z-values (Figure 2).
It is useful to mention that the quartile 3 = .29,
i. e., 25% of the sample, is at least .20 standard de-
viations above the media. On the other hand, percentile 90 = 1.63, i. e., at least 10% of the sample is
1.63 standard deviations from the media. Finally, the
value of the upper whisker is 1.73 and it shows a
noticeable number of participants that score above
this last value.
A glance at the scores of each subscale of the
PBA shows an also interesting panorama (Figure 3).
As expected, each subscale tends to score
differently and to emphasize also distinctive aspects of how parental burnout came about in this
particular context.
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Figure 2. Box and whisker plot of Z-values for PBA
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Figure 3. Box and whisker plot for the PBA subscales
Parental burnout score and its relation to
other variables
In a first stage, multiple regression analysis was
carried out to discriminate which variables are relevant with respect to the dependent variable of
parental burnout. The criterion of statistical significance as well as the exclusion of variables that
presented problems of collinearity with the dependent variable were considered. From these, 6 main
variables were highlighted to be considered within
the model: (a) the individualism IIS subscale, (b)
the gender of the participants, (c) the specialist GR
subscale, (d) the number of hours spent with the
child, (e) the family type, and (f) the GV relatedness subscale.
Analysis of variance was carried out to test model
that includes the relevant variables. Variables that
did not meet the criteria of significance, effect size
as well as observed statistical power were excluded
from the model. The final model included the following factors: (a) number of hours spent with the
child, (b) the family type, (c) the individualism IIS,
and (d) the gender of participants. This final model
explained 44% of the variance. Significant differen-
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ces between means according to family type were
found in parental burnout total score (F(4) = 5.9, p
< .001, η2 p = .24, 1-β = .97). Means are shown in
Figure 4 and present the impact of family type, although not controlling for the other variables included in the model. Bonferroni’s post-hoc tests confirmed mean differences between two-parent and
multigenerational family types (p = .02).
A significant effect of interaction between family
type and individualism score was also found (p = .02,
η2 p = .31, 1-β = .93). Thus, considering the parental
burnout score as a whole, and influence of family type
in interaction with individualism was found. Multigenerational families have shown much higher scores
compared to the two-parent families. In this sense,
it seems that individualism could play a moderating
role in the relationship between family type and parental burnout score. Further analysis would be required to corroborate this possible moderating effect.
A nonparametric approach to the same set of
data enables a different perspective as to how parental burnout could be analyzed in the context of
the current research (Table 2).
The significant differences appear to be between
being a mother or a father and age, that is, between
being a mother or a father and the age of the older
child, but most importantly between being a mother
or a father and the score in PBA. Thus, gender roles
emerge as possible stressors or predictive variables.
To clarify whether these differences are associated with gender roles, the Mann-Whitney U with
Bonferroni correction (.025) provides more evidence as to where the differences show up (Table 3).
As it can be seen, differences remain between being a father or a mother, and the respective age, the
age of the older child and the PBA total scores. However, when the grouping variable is the number of children in the household (1, 2, 3 or more), the differences
remain but not in relation to the PBA Total Score.
Figure 4. Box and whisker plot of Z-values for PBA
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Table 2. Kruskal Wallis Nonparametric Test on relevant sociodemografic variables
c2
df
Sig. asymptotic
How old are you?
21.764
1
.001
What kind of family do you belong to?
2.397
1
.122
How many biological children do you have?
0.831
1
.362
How many children live in your household? (Biological or not).
0.046
1
.830
How old is your older child? (If less than 1, write 0).
4.973
1
.026
How old is your younger child? (If less than 1, write 0).
1.421
1
.233
44.548
1
.001
PBA TOTAL
Note. Grouping variable: Are you: a father (1) or a mother (2)
Table 3. Mann-Whitney U for Sociodemographic Variables and PBA Total Score
U de
Mann-Whitney
W de
Wilcoxon
Z
Sig. asymptotic
(bilateral)
4801
15532
-4.665
.001
What kind of family do you belong to?
6653.5
11703.5
-1.548
.122
How many biological children do you have?
6920.5
17651.5
-0.912
.362
How many children live in your household?
(Biological or not).
7268.5
17999.5
-0.215
.830
How old is your older child? (If less than 1, write 0).
6144.5
16875.5
-2.230
.026
How old is your younger child? (If less than 1,
write 0).
6719
17450
-1.192
.233
PBA TOTAL
3690
8841
-6.674
.001
How old are you?
Note. Grouping variable: Are you: a father (1) or a mother (2)
Profiles of parents according to their
parental burnout condition
.8% to multigenerational families and .4% to another type of family structure. Out of these mothers,
in addition, .4% spend from 4 to 8 hours with their
children, 1.2% from 9 to 16 hours and .4% from 17
to 24 hours. The percentage reported within the
parental burnout condition is too low. Besides, no
significant associations were found between the
mentioned variables.
As mentioned earlier, this sample does not tend
to present high scores of parental burnout. Just a
few families display the minimal scores to be considered as burnout ones. As a matter of fact, only
2% of the participants are in a condition of parental
burnout. They’re all mothers. Out of this small percentage, .8% corresponds to two-parent families,
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The distribution of the sample suggests that the
parental burnout cut-off could be moved downwards
in the Costa Rican sample with respect to the original established by Roskam. Cluster 1 contains 60%
of the sample (149 participants), Cluster 2 the 6%
(14 participants), Cluster 3 the 8% (19 participants),
and Cluster 4 the 26% (65 participants). If Cluster 2
and 3 are considered as those with a higher incidence of parental burnout, it sums up to 14% of the
sample (33 participants). In Cluster 2, all the participants scored above 1.5 standard deviations up to
4.9 standard deviations in each subscale, whereas
in Cluster 3 the picture looks quite similar but with
few (4) participants scoring below 1 standard deviation in subscale 4: Emotional distancing from one´s
children (Figure 6).
A final interesting finding to support the assumptions for establishing a contextual cut-off point is that
the Interclass Correlation Coefficient for all the four
subscales of the PBA reaches for the average measures .846 (lower limit .813, upper limit .876), which is
a good achievement at a level of significance of .001.
By the same token, the correlation matrix showed
the highest correlation between subscales number
1 “parental exhaustion” and 3 “feelings of being fed
up” (.866) and the lowest correlation between the
subscales number 4 “emotional distancing from
one´s children” and 3 “feelings of being fed up” (.621).
Number 4 tends to achieve a similar correlation with
the other subscales, except for number 2 “contrast
On the other hand, if the percentage of people
who are not in parental burnout nor in risk conditions is considered, 74% belong to two-parent
families while 6.5% belong to multigenerational
families. Regarding the time they spend with their
children, 7.8% go from 0 to 3 hours, 52.9% from 4
to 8 hours, 21.3% from 9 to 16 hours and 16% from
17 to 24 hours.
Finally, according to the mean as well as to the
standard deviation, cut-off points were established
to determine the low, medium, and high level of
individualism. Considering the level of individualism
of the parents, the following table shows the percentages according to their exhaustion/not exhaustion condition (Table 4).
As it can be seen in the table above, most parents
have an average level of individualism. As mentioned previously, it is important to consider these
scores in conjunction with the family type, and not
as separate variables, since they showed an interaction effect on the parental burnout score. However,
considering that most of the sample does not meet
the parental burnout diagnostic condition, it is also
relevant to interpret these results cautiously.
Finally, following Suárez et al. (2022) to some extent, a cluster analysis provides a clearer panorama
of how the data better represent parental burnout
in Costa Rica. Figure 5 shows the solution with four
clusters to compare with the authors’ person-centered approach.
Table 4. Individualism level and burnout
Individualism level
Burnout
n (%)
No burnout
n (%)
Low individualism
1 (0.4%)
45 (18.2%)
Moderate individualism
4 (1.6%)
161 (65.2%)
High individualism
0 (0%)
36 (14.6%)
Total
5 (2%)
242 (98%)
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Figure 5. Parental burnout latent profiles
Zscore: Emotional exhaustion in parental role
Zscore: Contrast in parental self
Zscore: Feelings being fed up
Zscore: Emotional distancing from one´s children
Figure 6. Distribution of the sample by cluster
Cluster 1
Cluster 2
Cluster 3
Cluster 4
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ceive parenting as not exhausting or overwhelming
since it is organized around the appropriate distribution of tasks among different family members.
This kind of familial tasks-distribution is, for instance, also characteristic of black American families in
which such a strategy enables younger mothers to
assume work and responsibility more freely in childcare (Stack & Burton, 2016). On the other hand,
in this context, multigenerational families seem to
deal with a greater amount of parental burnout. It
is also the case of the non-classical familial configurations, namely, not necessarily biparental ones.
In other words, multigenerational and non-classical
families are likely to experience a greater level of
conflict and caring demands due most likely to multiple and concurring parenting styles.
It is noteworthy that parent-child interactions
under the depicted circumstances in the Costa Rican Central Valley families seem to be based most
likely on strong psychological resources to deal with
rearing duties, so that neither exhaustion nor emotional distancing interfere meaningfully in familial
life quality (Mikolajczak et al., 2018).
A second hypothesis pointed to parental burnout as a socioemotional risk factor for mothers,
but not necessarily for fathers. Since the prevalence of parental burnout is rather low in this sample,
statistically significant differences between mothers
and fathers were not detected. Nevertheless, it
could mean that the low rates in parental burnout
are somehow related to the even lower rates in individualism, enabling parents to fair distributions of
tasks, which was proposed in the third hypothesis.
Therefore, according to the third hypothesis low
individualism may represent a protective factor to
parental burnout.
Anyway, as Suizzo et al. (2019) stated, increasing
research suggests that collectivism, or, in the current
study, low individualism, is not necessarily contrary
to promote independence and agency; then these
dimensions are not dichotomous, but orthogonal
and multidimensional so that the link between individualism and other psychological traits and so-
in parental self” (.786). This is a striking picture that
may depict a cultural trait in which the “emotional
distancing from one´s children dimension” involves
the dimension of parental self and not directly the
perception of being burdened by the caring tasks.
Discussion
In this study, data were gathered about parental
burnout amid families from the Costa Rican Central Valley. Middle class families with at least one
child under one roof were interviewed. Thereby,
the study strives to highlight the culturally specific
characteristics of the parental burnout. Specific familial configurations of parental burnout, extreme
fatigue, emotional detachment, and lack of efficacy
are brought to bear. Of particular interest are the likely variations of parental burnout within families, i.
e., intracultural dissimilarity. Some of these aspects
have been confirmed which will be discussed in
contrast with the hypothesis.
The first hypothesis claimed that parental burnout rates arise among the mothers of the sample but not among fathers. This hypothesis has
been partially confirmed. Although the 2% prevalence of parental burnout in the sample meets the
lower rank-limit cited by Roskam et al. (2017), it has
only been observed among mothers in the current
study, but only a few parents report risk of parental
burnout. Albeit it is true that more mothers than
fathers qualify in such conditions, the bulk of both
mothers and fathers still score way below the minimum to be classified as burned out. Beyond any
doubt, data lead rather to the conclusion that the
general trend in this sample of the Costa Rican Central Valley with high education level is to enforce
parenting styles with low or very low grades of parental burnout. Theoretically, the trend to parental
burnout, if any, is in a certain balance between risk
factors and resources, so that parents do not feel
overwhelmed by the parenting tasks (Mikolajczak &
Roskam, 2020; Mikolajczak & Roskam, 2018).
Nevertheless, data could shed some light on a likely cultural trait that might enables parents to per-
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cialization goals requires further research as to the
specific dimensions that play a central role.
The lower the level of individualism, the lower
the level of parental burnout, and so consequently,
the better for mothers to take care of self-interests
and to devoid themselves to parenting duties in a
more appropriate way, as this sample shows.
The Cluster Analysis performed on the PBA moves the current data a step closer to a new estimation of the cut-off for Costa Rica, based on cultural
traits, even though further analysis is required to
reach accuracy in this point, maybe in the same way
Suárez et al. (2022) have done.
It is important to highlight that the main limitation of this study was the sampling process, which
consisted of a sample of participants from the Costa Rican Central Valley with high urbanization rates
and high level of education. To some extent, people
who were recruited belong to a similar middle-class
social milieu of the Costa Rican society, with access
to technology and technological media. This social
group gather psychosocial strengths and usually
have access to information about best parenting
practices that enable them to apply a more accurate knowledge to their own parenting experience. In
a certain way, these findings represent a restricted
cluster of Costa Rican society, i. e., not necessarily
representative of other social configurations.
To overcome such limitation, in future studies
about parental burnout in Costa Rican society and
culture, it would be mandatory to establish a first
sampling process among social clusters of interest,
evaluating the cultural characteristics in advance.
It is even more important to randomly select the
families. For instance, families could be selected
from public schools in specific zones classified as
high-risk due to poverty or social disadvantage to
compare them with middle or high-class families of
children attending private schools. From a methodological point of view, it is more likely to find mothers and even fathers with burnout. Variables such
as gender role, individualism versus collectivism,
level of education, parenting practices and the rele-
vance of values in child rearing practices would also
be easier to differentiate. Without addressing such
methodological concerns, becomes very difficult to
establish specific cultural traits of the Costa Rican
society attached to parental burnout.
Note
This paper covers the findings of the Costa Rica
branch of the “International Investigation of Parental Burnout” (IIPB) consortium, a 40-nation study
aiming at comparing the prevalence of parental
burnout across cultures, conducted by Isabelle Roskam and Moïra Mikolajczak, Université catholique
de Louvain, Belgium. The Costa Rican study has
been carried out in the Institute for Psychological
Research at the University of Costa Rica.
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