Stress goes from workers to their children

When employees feel stressed after work, they sometimes fake being happy while interacting with their children. Teenagers learn to mimic this habit from their parents. Drake Van Egdom, Jiajin Tong, Kimberly French and Jing Zhang write that when teens disguise their feelings, they tend to feel greater emotional exhaustion at school, decreasing their academic performance and mirroring the diminished well-being of their parents.

Emotional exhaustion is a critical issue that affects employees and their families. It occurs when people feel a lack of energy and a sense that their emotional resources are drained. This condition is associated with various health problems, including depression, anxiety, sleep disturbances and cardiovascular diseases. Emotional exhaustion also leads to poor job performance, increased absenteeism and conflicts between work and personal life.

Our study integrates social learning with spillover and crossover models to examine how parents’ emotional exhaustion at work affects their teenage children’s emotional exhaustion at school. Spillover refers to the process in which experiences in one domain such as work affect thoughts, feelings or behaviours in another domain such as family life. Crossover, on the other hand, involves the transmission of emotions and energy states across individuals. Through this process, a parent’s work experiences can influence their home life, which in turn affects their children’s experiences at home and subsequently at school.

Parents who are emotionally drained have difficulty engaging in positive social interactions at home. They fake their emotions, a phenomenon called surface acting, to suppress negativity or display positive emotions they do not genuinely feel. For example, they may fake being happy while playing with their child even though they may feel stressed on the inside.

Emotion regulation is a constant demand for parents because what you display is crucial for warm parenting behaviour as well as children’s social and emotional development. There are also strong expectations to suppress negative emotions, expressing positivity and socialising appropriate mood displays. Due to these expectations, masking emotional exhaustion is not only possible for parents but also necessary to fulfil their parental role. Our data suggest that for both mothers and fathers, feeling emotionally exhausted is related to increased surface acting at home with their children.

Research on crossover and social learning of emotion suggests that parents’ emotional states influence their children. Teenagers observe their parents’ behaviour and learn to mimic their emotional regulation strategies. Observational learning is a key mechanism through which surface acting and subsequently emotional exhaustion is transmitted from parents to adolescents. When parents pretend to feel what they don’t genuinely feel, adolescents learn to do the same. Consistent with these ideas, our study found that when mothers surface act, their teenage children are likely to act the same way.

School settings also have expectations for adolescents displaying emotions. As an example, students are supposed to be calm and positive during school hours. These expectations are socially ingrained, motivating teenagers to show positive emotions and withhold negative ones. As a result, they are encouraged to engage in emotion regulation that they learned at home, such as surface acting. We find that this is associated with greater emotional exhaustion at school. Similar to employee emotional exhaustion, teenagers’ emotional exhaustion has significant impacts on their well-being and academic performance.

The quality of the parent-child relationship may play a crucial role in the transmission of emotional exhaustion. Adolescents with higher-quality relationships with their parents may be more likely to observe and learn emotional regulation strategies from them. These relationships are characterised by warmth, support, trust and respect. Our study suggests that the transmission of emotional exhaustion through surface acting does not depend on the quality of the parent-child relationship.

The study separately explored the transmission of emotional exhaustion from mothers and fathers. Mothers’ emotional exhaustion has a significant impact on adolescent exhaustion, but fathers’ emotional exhaustion did not. This difference may be due to societal expectations and norms that mothers are more protective of the family role and better at compartmentalising work experiences. Adolescents may see mothers as more important role models for emotional regulation.

Understanding the transmission of emotional exhaustion from parents to adolescents has several implications for organisations. Employers can play a crucial role in mitigating the problem among their employees before its negative effects spread to their families. The goal is not necessarily to eliminate surface acting at home, as parents showing genuine negative expressions might also pose a risk for adolescent development.

Here we present some strategies. Organisations should foster a culture of support and understanding where employees feel valued and cared for. Giving employees more control over their work can afford them the flexibility to meet their work demands in a way that fits their needs. Employers must help employees develop healthy emotional regulation strategies that they can use both at work and at home.

Parents can also take steps to manage their emotional exhaustion and its impact on their children. We have these practical recommendations for them:

• Take time for yourself and your family to recharge and manage your emotional well-being.
• Prioritise high-quality sleep.
• Demonstrate positive emotional regulation strategies that teenagers can observe and learn.
• Maintain open and honest communication with your children about emotions and stress.

The transmission of emotional exhaustion from parents to teenagers highlights the interconnectedness of work and family life. By understanding and addressing this issue, organisations and families can create healthier environments that support the well-being of both employees and their children. Reducing emotional exhaustion at work not only benefits employees but also has far-reaching effects on their families, particularly teenagers. By implementing supportive strategies and fostering positive relationships, organisations can mitigate the impact of emotional exhaustion and promote overall well-being.

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