Emotional Intelligence Attenuates the Harmful Effects of Parental Perfectionism and Emotional Suppression on Parental Burnout: A Moderated Mediation Model

In recent years, there has been increased interest in the relationship between parenting perfectionism (Snell et al., 2005; Lee et al., 2012) and parental burnout (Linström et al., 2011; Mikolajczak et al., 2021), and this is due to two reasons. First, parents today are more prone to parenting perfectionism as they place increasingly high standards on both their parenting behavior and their child's development and are increasingly concerned about their childrearing mistakes. Second, an increasing number of parents are su!ering from parental burnout —a psychological syndrome observed almost worldwide (Roskam et al., in press). Parental burnout is defined as pervasive exhaustion related to one's parental role, emotional distancing from one's children, and a loss of parental fulfillment, all of which stand in stark contrast to what the parent felt and thought about parenthood before (Roskam et al., 2018). Burgeoning studies demonstrated parenting perfectionism, especially the dimension of perfectionistic concerns—preoccupation with self-criticism including concern over mistakes and doubts about own behaviors —, as one of the crux antecedents to parental burnout in both Western (Lin et al., in press; Sorkkila & Aunola, 2020) and Eastern contexts (Kawamoto et al., 2018). This study takes a further step to explore whether parental emotional suppression would mediate the positive relation between perfectionistic concerns and parental burnout. Moreover, it examines the role of emotional intelligence in bu!ering both the direct and indirect (through parental emotional suppression) e!ects of perfectionistic concerns on parental burnout. A total of 439 Polish parents (65.1% mothers) of children younger than 19 years old (child's age: Mage = 11.03, SDage = 6.45) participated in this study from November 2020 to January 2021. They completed measures of parental burnout (Roskam et al., 2018), parenting perfectionism (Lin et al., in press), parental emotional suppression (designed for this study), and trait emotional intelligence (Petrides, 2009). Data were analyzed using IBM SPSS 25.0 and PROCESS macro 3.5 (Hayes, 2018, 2020). The results supported a regression-based moderated mediation model and demonstrated that emotional intelligence bu!ers both the positive direct (B = -5.85, SE = 1.92, p = .002, 95% CI = [-9.2, -0.21]) and indirect e!ects (through parental emotional suppression; index of moderated mediation = -1.29 with bootstrapped SE = 0.70 and 95% CI = [-2.92, -0.21]) of perfectionistic concerns on parental burnout. This study contributes to the growing literature on parental perfectionism and parental burnout. It demonstrates the nature of the relationship between parental perfectionism and parental burnout when emotion regulation and emotional intelligence are considered. Given recent optimistic findings on the brief (e.g., a 15-hr intervention) emotional intelligence training (Kotsou et al., 2011, 2018), the current study provides practical implications for preventing parental burnout