Peer-reviewed article
Eco-Emotion Profiles Among Parents and Links to Violent and Neglectful Parenting: Parental Burnout as a Mediating Pathway.
Nicola Carone, Jacopo Tracchegiani, Gianluca Cruciani, Andrea Zagaria ·
Summary
Written by AI, not yet AICS's view · claude-haiku-4-5-20251001This study examined how parents' emotional responses to climate change relate to violent and neglectful parenting. Researchers surveyed 1,203 Italian parents and identified three groups based on climate-related emotions: disengaged, concerned, and distressed. The study found that parents experiencing high climate distress reported more parental burnout, which in turn predicted higher rates of psychological aggression, physical assault, and neglect toward children. The findings suggest that climate-related emotional stress may be an emerging risk factor for child maltreatment.
Key points
- Three eco-emotion profiles identified: Eco-disengaged (18.8%), Eco-concerned (60.6%), and Eco-distressed (20.7%)
- Eco-distressed parents reported significantly higher parental burnout than eco-concerned parents (SMD = 0.324, p < .001)
- Parental burnout predicted psychological aggression (β = .370), physical assault (β = .288), and neglect (β = .525)
- Eco-distressed profile showed positive indirect associations with all three maltreatment types through parental burnout pathway
- Climate-related distress functions as an emerging caregiver risk factor requiring preventive interventions
Limitations
The study uses self-report measures from a single country (Italy) with cisgender heterosexual parents only, which limits generalizability to other family structures and cultural contexts. The cross-sectional design cannot establish causality, only associations between variables.
Abstract
Climate change is a psychosocial stressor with implications for parenting and child safety. Many parents experience eco-emotions that can tax caregiving resources and self-regulation, yet evidence is scarce on how eco-emotion profiles relate to parental burnout and violent and neglectful parenting. This study aimed to identify eco-emotion profiles and to test whether parental burnout explains associations with psychological aggression, physical assault, and neglect toward children. Participants were 1,203 cisgender heterosexual Italian parents (70.16% mothers; M = 45.60, SD = 9.37) who completed self-report measures through an online survey. Latent profile analysis of eco-anxiety, eco-guilt, eco-grief, solastalgia, and eco-paralysis identified eco-emotion profiles; structural equation modeling tested direct and indirect effects of profile membership on maltreatment outcomes via parental burnout. Three profiles emerged: Eco-disengaged (18.8%), Eco-concerned (60.6%), and Eco-distressed (20.7%). Eco-distressed parents reported higher parental burnout than eco-concerned parents (standardized mean difference [SMD] = 0.324, p < .001). Parental burnout predicted psychological aggression (β = .370), physical assault (β = .288), and neglect (β = .525; all ps < .001). Eco-distressed membership showed positive indirect associations via parental burnout on psychological aggression (SMD = 0.120), physical assault (SMD = 0.093), and neglect (SMD = 0.170), with all 95% bootstrap CIs > 0, as well as a negative direct association with psychological aggression (SMD = -0.193, p = .014). Climate-related distress may function as an emerging caregiver risk factor, emphasizing the need for preventive interventions that strengthen parental resources and address climate-related emotional burden within child protection frameworks.
Findings the Hub has extracted
Each claim below is labelled by its type of design and links back to this report.
- Intervention
- This is an observational study with no intervention tested; it examines associations between eco-emotion profiles and parenting outcomes mediated by parental burnout
- Population
- 1,203 Italian parents (70.16% mothers, mean age 45.60 years) in heterosexual cisgender relationships
Key finding
Eco-distressed parents showed higher parental burnout than eco-concerned parents (SMD = 0.324, p < .001)