Parenting and parental burnout in Africa

Abstract

A recent initiative known as the International Investigation of Parental Burnout, sought to study the prevalence of parental burnout in over 40 countries globally using the Parental Burnout Assessment (PBA) instrument. Four countries investigated here provide a first insight into parental burnout in Africa, based on a pooled dataset of 738 parents (48.8% mothers) sampled from Burundi (n = 187; 25.3%), Cameroon (n = 208; 28.2%), Rwanda (n = 240; 32.5%), and Togo (n = 103; 14%). As a first step, we tested the content validity of the PBA that was developed and validated in Western countries. Second, we tested the relations between the PBA and several sociodemographic characteristics such as age, gender, and level of education. The results provide evidence that the concept of parental burnout makes sense for African parents, and that the PBA can be considered as a psychometrically sound instrument to measure it. However, the results also point to the need for further exploration of the nature of parental burnout in Africa. As in previous studies, low correlations between parental burnout and the sociodemographic characteristics were found. Finally, the current results suggest the existence of parenting subcultures across the four participating countries that would be interesting to document.

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