Original studyFrontiers in Psychology, 2026Read the paper →
Many parents count down to the day their child starts nursery, hoping a few hours of care will give them room to breathe. High levels of parental burnout, a state of deep exhaustion tied to the parenting role, are thought to affect around 8% of parents in developed countries. A new Polish study suggests that a place at nursery or preschool, on its own, may not bring the relief many parents expect.
Researchers at SWPS University in Poland followed 409 parents whose only or oldest child was aged 18 to 47 months when the study began. The study appears in Frontiers in Psychology. Parents completed online questionnaires four times, six months apart, between May 2023 and January 2025.
Just over half the parents were mothers, and parents were aged 22 to 47. At the start, 43% of the children were already in nursery or preschool, and by the final round that figure had reached 82% of the original sample. Most parents had at least a bachelor’s degree, were married, and lived in large cities.
Burnout was measured with a standard 23-item questionnaire covering four symptoms. These were exhaustion in the parenting role, emotional distance from one’s children, a painful contrast with the parent one used to be, and feeling fed up with being a parent.
The team compared parents whose children never attended care during the study, those whose children attended throughout, and those whose children started during it. Burnout did not change differently across the three groups, and attending care was not tied to burnout levels at any of the four time points.
Emotional exhaustion fell slightly from the first to the second assessment, but the drop was the same whether or not a child had started care. Among parents whose children were already in care at the start, the days and hours spent there and how much the child enjoyed it were not linked to burnout.
Mothers reported higher burnout than fathers, and parents with more children reported more burnout than those with one. Both gaps were already present at the first assessment, and neither predicted how overall burnout changed over time. Parents with more children did show a steeper rise in the feeling that they were no longer the parent they had once been.
The authors suggest any relief may be cancelled out by new pressures, although they did not test this. Starting care can be emotional, and in Poland, where few children under two attend, some parents may feel judged or guilty. It also often coincides with a return to work: about a quarter of mothers in the starting group moved from not working to working over the same period.
The study has clear limits. The parents were recruited online rather than at random and were mostly well-educated and financially secure, so the findings may not apply to all Polish families or to other countries. Assessments were six months apart, so short-lived reactions around the start of care could have been missed, and small effects in either direction cannot be ruled out.
Childcare has well-established benefits for children’s development and for parents’ work opportunities, and the authors stress that their results are not an argument against investing in it. They suggest that efforts to ease parental burnout may need to pair high-quality childcare with family-friendly workplaces, flexible parental leave, and psychological support for parents.
