Inés Botto, a graduate student in the Human Development & Family Studies (HDFS) department, helped author a recently published study that examined how different combinations of parenting circumstances — such as children’s ages, employment and child care — related to parents’ level of burnout and mental health at two different points in the early COVID-19 pandemic.
In this Q&A, Botto talks through the results of the study, which was led by her advisor, HDFS Associate Professor Margaret Kerr, and co-authored by fellow HDFS graduate student Erika Gonzalez and Sydney Aronson ’23, a former Kerr Parent Lab undergraduate research assistant.
What did this study find?
We were interested in looking at two things that influence parenting: burnout, or the feeling of overwhelm parents might experience as they try to balance all the competing demands of parenthood; and mental health. By surveying parents at two different points in the early COVID-19 pandemic, we wanted to see if we could find patterns in what they were balancing and their level of burnout or negative mental health symptoms, like anxiety and depression. We also wanted to find out if burnout predicted worse mental health and vice versa.
We found that furloughed workers with young children had the highest rates of burnout and negative mental health symptoms. We also found that, for remote workers with young children and in-person workers with children of varied ages, the quality of their mental health in April 2020 predicted their burnout levels in December 2020. For stay-at-home parents and remote workers with older children, burnout levels in April 2020 predicted mental health quality in December 2020.
These findings suggest that parenting circumstances affected parental burnout more than they affected mental health. They also suggest that links between parental burnout and mental health may depend on context.
Why does this matter?
Parental burnout is something many U.S. families face, especially compared to other countries where parents have more support. We had an early child care shortage going into 2020 that the pandemic exacerbated. We know parental burnout is not good for parents or kids — if parents are burned out, they may not be able to engage with their children in the ways they’d like to. We know that burnout occurs when someone’s challenges outweigh the resources they have to respond to those challenges, and for parents, that can look like a lack of adequate child care or an income that’s too low to adequately support the family.
What action should be taken?
I think the pandemic exposed fractures in a lot of our systems that could be addressed through policy changes. We see that parents need more support, and there are a lot of benefits to providing that support.
In this study, our sample was mostly parents who are white, college educated and upper-middle class — they didn’t face some of the additional stressors other groups did during the pandemic, such as lower-paid essential workers who were more exposed to COVID-19 or people of color who may have experienced an increase in racism and hateful rhetoric during that time. But we still see real burnout and mental health impacts among this more privileged population, and I think that shows we need universal supports all families can benefit from, such as increased access to parental leave.
We saw in our study that the worst faring families had furloughed parents or lost jobs as a result of the pandemic, so you can imagine the increased financial strain, and those families also tended to have younger children. Policy changes, such as child care subsidies and child tax credits, would be really helpful. And when we think about the folks who continued to work but did so remotely, having flexible parental leave to help their kids adjust to remote learning could be very beneficial for situations like the pandemic or other stressful situations that come up for families.
What related research is being done?
In the Kerr Parent Lab, we’re also looking at parents’ perceptions of how their parenting experience changed during the pandemic. For example, the increased time together could’ve fostered more conflict, but we’re also seeing that parents really appreciated the opportunity to get a better look at their kids’ schooling and spend more time with their children in general.
This study, titled “Parental burnout and mental health across COVID-19 parenting circumstances: A person-centered approach,” was published in the August 2025 edition of the Journal of Marriage and Family.
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