By Jessica Grose, Image by Davin G Photography/Getty Images The New York Times, June 11, 2022
Lately, I’ve been saying that my level of burnout feels like “Covid of the soul.” Which is to say I mostly feel normal, and that we’ve gradually been able to ease back into the rhythms of our prepandemic life, but there remains a residual exhaustion, partly psychic, that I haven’t had time to fully resolve. There are some days when my alarm goes off and the first thought that occurs to me is: I can’t believe I have to get up and do all the things again.
I certainly had this thought in 2019 — I even wrote a guide that year about how to avoid parental burnout when you have little kids, so clearly it had already crossed my mind before Covid. But I have more days like this now, when I exhibit one of the signs researchers have used to define the phenomenon. Though it isn’t a clinical diagnosis, according to psychologists, to qualify as having parental burnout, you need all four of these symptoms: overwhelming exhaustion, emotional detachment from your children, loss of productivity and pleasure in one’s parental role, and a change in your behavior.
Like you, I think of myself as a pretty OK parent, but: Sound familiar?
Last month, The Times’s Catherine Pearson reported on a survey about parental burnout from Ohio State University that was conducted between January and April of last year — one of the bleaker stages of the pandemic, before most adults were fully vaccinated and when a lot of children were still not in in-person school full time. That survey, Pearson wrote, found that “66 percent of working parents meet the criteria for parental burnout.”
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