Marital Satisfaction and Parental Burnout: Longitudinal Indirect Effects of Family Emotional Expressiveness

Objective

This study investigates family emotional expressiveness as a mediator of the longitudinal, bidirectional relationship between marital satisfaction and parental burnout.

Background

Parental burnout, a state of chronic exhaustion linked to caregiving, adversely impacts family well-being. While marital satisfaction is a known protective factor, reliance on cross-sectional designs in prior research has left the bidirectional nature of this link and its underlying mechanisms unclear.

Method

Using three-wave longitudinal data (collected at 6-month intervals) from 671 Chinese families (555 mothers, 388 fathers of middle school students), we employed the Parental Burnout Assessment, ENRICH Marital Satisfaction Scale, and Self-Expressiveness in the Family Questionnaire. Autoregressive path models were tested for parents separately and within a dyadic model.

Results

Correlational analyses revealed a negative association between marital satisfaction and parental burnout. However, longitudinal path analyses, conducted both separately for each parent and dyadically, showed no significant direct bidirectional effects. Instead, both modeling approaches revealed that family emotional expressiveness played a key role in the dynamics: T1 marital satisfaction predicted lower T3 burnout via T2 positive and negative emotional expressiveness, and T1 burnout predicted lower T3 marital satisfaction through the same pathway.

Conclusion

Family emotional expressiveness emerges as a key mechanism driving the bidirectional relationship between marital satisfaction and parental burnout. These findings suggest that interventions targeting family emotional expressiveness may effectively enhance marital quality and reduce parental burnout, offering a novel theoretical framework for family-centered support.