“I Have Nothing Left in the Tank”: Parental Burnout‐Relevant Experiences Amid Climate Change
Nicola Carone, Jacopo Tracchegiani, Gianluca CrucianiABSTRACT
Objective
To explore how parents describe climate‐related depletion in the parenting role and how a parental‐burnout framework can inform its interpretation.
Background
Climate conversations can place emotion‐regulation demands on parents, including managing a child's distress while containing their own and reassuring without credible closure. Yet how parents experience these demands remains underexplored.
Method
Forty‐five parents residing in Italy who had discussed climate change with a child aged 6–18 in the previous 6 months, recruited through community, institutional, and online channels, completed semi‐structured Zoom interviews. We used theory‐informed reflexive thematic analysis: data‐led coding, then interpretation through the four parental burnout dimensions.
Results
Four themes described burnout‐relevant, symptom‐aligned experiences: “Holding the storm twice” (parallel emotional load‐bearing); “The scale‐mismatch spiral” (effort without closure); “The glass wall response” (distancing as survival); and “Leaking into everything” (saturation and loss of ordinary joy). In variant accounts, parents described shared coparenting and bounded media exposure as easing depletion.
Conclusion
In these parents' accounts, parenting amid climate change involved burnout‐relevant experiences; scale mismatch, loss of closure, and reduced recovery are candidate processes to test.
Implications
Mental health practitioners and educators may help parents share containment work, bound climate conversations, and protect recovery time, pending evaluation.