Mental health · Jul 20, 2026

Parental burnout is not a lack of love

There is a tiredness that a good night’s sleep will not fix, and that is ashamed to say its own name. Science has given it a name, and naming it, in this case, is where care begins.

She came to the appointment for her son, the way it almost always happens. She brought the health booklet, the school reports, and a list of questions saved on her phone. Only at the end, hand already on her purse, did her voice crack, and what came out was a sentence I hear more often than you might imagine, spoken almost without sound. I love my children, doctor, but I can’t keep being a mother. Right behind it came the apology, as if being exhausted were a crime.

Science took this exhaustion seriously

What that mother described has a name. In 2018, Isabelle Roskam and Moïra Mikolajczak, researchers at the University of Louvain in Belgium, started from the testimony of hundreds of exhausted parents and built the instrument that now measures parental burnout in dozens of countries. The picture that emerged has four faces: exhaustion in one’s role as a parent, the painful contrast between the parent you are today and the parent you once were, the feeling of being fed up with your own parenting, and emotional distancing from your children. This is not self-indulgence or weakness of character. It is a burnout specific to the caregiving role, and it tends to reach precisely the people who took that role most seriously.

This exhaustion shows itself in four ways

Exhaustion comes first and is the easiest part to recognize. It is the parent who wakes up already tired at the prospect of one more day of caregiving, crosses the hours running on empty, and reaches the evening feeling there is nothing left to give. I am not talking about the ordinary tiredness of a full week, but about a depletion that builds up over months and no longer responds to a short break or a good weekend.

The contrast may be the most painful dimension to listen to. The person remembers the parent they used to manage to be, present, patient, inventive, and cannot recognize themselves in the irritable caregiver they have become. That gulf between who you were and who you are weighed so heavily in the testimony gathered by the Belgian researchers that it became one of the measures of the condition, and in my office it usually arrives dressed in shame.

There is also the saturation the authors describe as being fed up with the role itself. The person still loves their children and, even so, can no longer bear the routine of being responsible for them, with no one to tag in, no pause, and no finish line in sight. Saying this out loud sounds forbidden in our culture, and that is exactly why almost no one says it before falling ill.

Finally comes the emotional distancing, and it tends to frighten those who notice it in themselves. The practical care goes on, the bath happens, the lunchbox gets packed, the homework gets checked, but everything starts running on autopilot, with less conversation, less play, and less presence. I read this retreat as the desperate economy of someone who has nothing left to draw on, not as proof that love has run out. In my practice I see the full picture coexist with good performance at work and a social life that looks intact, which delays the call for help.

There used to be a village around every child

Three years later, the same team coordinated an international consortium that applied the instrument to 17,409 fathers and mothers in 42 countries, and the result drew a map worth sitting with. The prevalence of parental burnout varies dramatically from one country to the next, and what best explains that variation is not income or the number of children, but how individualistic each culture is. Where raising children has become the solitary task of isolated couples, with little of a village around them and an impossibly high bar for performance, parents burn out more. In the authors’ conclusion, individualism weighs more heavily on parental burnout than economic inequality between countries or any individual characteristic of the family.

Brazil has begun to measure its own exhaustion. A 2024 survey by two Brazilian companies in the motherhood space heard from two thousand mothers and found signs of emotional exhaustion in nine out of ten respondents, with six out of ten caregivers showing signs of parental burnout. It is a market survey, with the limitations of a self-selected sample, and even so the size of that number matches what I see in my office, where the question of how the caregiver is doing almost never gets its turn.

Talking about this matters because parental burnout does not stand still. In 2019, Moïra Mikolajczak, together with James Gross of Stanford and Isabelle Roskam herself, followed more than two thousand parents across three waves of research and showed that this burnout travels with the recurring urge to escape one’s own family and with increases in neglect and violence toward the children, even in loving homes that would never picture themselves in that sentence. I write this with no intention of frightening anyone, but to pull the subject out from under the shame that keeps it hidden, because the burned-out parent who stays silent tends to get worse alone, while the one who manages to say out loud what they feel has already begun to protect themselves and their children.

In my practice, the caregiver is a patient too

In the office, I learned to ask about the caregiver with the same seriousness I bring to asking about the child. In the families I follow, many of them neurodiverse families, the caregiver’s exhaustion is often the best-hidden clinical finding in the room, tucked behind the reports and the therapy schedule. When burnout appears, the plan stops being only the child’s plan and starts to include the adult, with attention to sleep, the rebuilding of some support network, a real division of labor and, when called for, psychotherapy or treatment of the caregiver’s own, because no one can sustain for long a kind of care that only draws from within.

If this essay found you in the middle of that exhaustion, the gesture I propose for this week is small and hard. Choose one person you trust and tell them, without any varnish, what caregiving has felt like on the inside. It does not have to be your spouse, and it does not have to be a doctor. It has to be someone who will listen without handing you a ready-made prescription. Parental burnout grows in silence, and sharing is the first place where it starts to shrink. No family should have to figure this out alone.

Dr. Marcelo Gobbo Jr.
Family and Community Physician (CRM-MG 74.511 · RQE 69038), with a master’s degree in Psychology from the Federal University of Uberlândia and training at the Program for Recovery and Community Health at Yale. He cares for neurodiverse families and people living with severe mental illness, in person and remotely.