When Parenting Feels Overwhelming: Caregiving Helplessness and Parental Burnout in Mothers Exposed to Intimate Partner Violence

Parental burnout is a chronic psychological condition marked by overwhelming exhaustion, emotional distancing from one’s children, feelings of being fed up, and a perceived contrast with one’s previous parental self. Although parental burnout is increasingly acknowledged as a critical mental health issue among parents, its manifestation within the context of Intimate Partner Violence (IPV) remains insufficiently examined. Guided by attachment theory, family systems theory, and the spillover hypothesis, the present study investigated IPV as a potential risk factor for parental burnout and examined caregiving helplessness as a possible mediating mechanism. The study utilized a community-based sample of 600 cisgender heterosexual mothers (M = 40.91, SD = 6.54) residing in Italy, all of whom had biological children mean aged 8.32 years (SD = 5.05; 51.83% assigned female at birth). Findings indicated that mothers with IPV experiences reported significantly higher levels of caregiving helplessness and greater severity across all dimensions of parental burnout compared to mothers without such experiences. Furthermore, structural equation modeling revealed that more frequent IPV exposure was associated with elevated caregiving helplessness, which, in turn, contributed to heightened levels of exhaustion, emotional distancing, feeling of being fed up, and contrast. These findings highlight the need for early intervention addressing both IPV-related trauma and the internalized helplessness in caregiving under chronic stress. Public health and family policies should prioritize preventing parental burnout in IPV contexts to support maternal well-being and interrupt the intergenerational transmission of violence and trauma, ultimately protecting future generations from the long-term consequences of domestic violence.