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Category: Project

Description: Positive parenting prescriptions prevailing in Western countries encourage parents to regulate their emotions and, more specifically, to show more positive emotion to their children and con-trol negative emotions while parenting. The beneficial effect of this practice on child develop-ment has been much documented, but its possible costs for parents are currently unknown. The current study borrowed the well-known emotional labor framework from organizational psy-chology to examine this issue. We sought to answer five questions in particular: (1) Do parents perceive display rules? (i.e., do they feel pressured to up-regulate positive emotions and down-regulate negative emotions while parenting?) (2) Do parents make regulatory efforts to comply with these rules? (3) Is this costly? (4) Is it possible that this regulatory effort increases the risk of parental burnout? (5) Are there strategies that render this effort less costly? We inves-tigated these questions in a sample of 347 parents. The results revealed that parents perceive emotional display rules, which bring about a regulatory effort and, in turn, increase vulnerabil-ity to parental burnout. How parents meet display rules also matters, in that regulating emotions superficially (surface acting, i.e., putting on a mask) is more detrimental than regulating genu-inely (deep acting, i.e., changing one’s emotion). Overall, these results confirm the potential of the emotional labor framework, which helps us understand how external pressures on parents increase parental burnout.