Associations between parental burnout, co-parenting and perceived social support in a sample of French parents living in couple : Network and directed acyclic graph analyses
Résumé
Context: The relationship parents have with their spouse or co-parent, and the social support they receive from their entourage, are among the risk or protective factors that can have a significant impact on the experience of parenthood and thus contribute to the incidence of parental burnout. Co-parenting refers to the involvement of each co-parent (whether or not they are living together as a couple) in their parental role, and the way in which they support and coordinate each other in their role with the child. The co-parent is generally the primary source of social support, particularly with regard to parenting roles and tasks. However, the distinction between actual and perceived social support is crucial, as is the importance of differentiating between the availability of support and the individual's satisfaction with the support received.
Objectives: we sought to identify the relationships between parental burnout and perceived social support (effective and level of satisfaction), on the one hand, and, on the other hand, between parental burnout and co-parenting, in a sample of parents living as a couple.
Sample: A total of 533 French parents living as a couple (including 124 fathers) completed a set of online questionnaires including: the Parental Burnout Assessment (Roskam, Brianda, & Mikolajczak, 2018), the Social Support Questionnaire (Sarason et al., 1983) and the Co-Parenting Scale (Feinberg, Brown, & Kan, 2012), as well as socio-demographic questions.
Results: The results are currently being analyzed. In order to investigate the relationships between our variables, network analyses will be performed. To further explore the directionality of relationships, a directed acyclic diagram (DAG) will be estimated.
Discussion: The results will be discussed with regard to their practical implications in terms of interventions that can be proposed to support parents faced with low social support or dysfunctional co-parenting. This is particularly important given that the quality of social support and co-parenting are key factors that can generally be addressed to prevent or treat parental burnout.