The Contribution of Household Chaos and Fatigue to Maternal Stress
Vaschina, Madeline, Gilmore, Linda, Cuskelly, Monica, and Lurie, Janine (2025) The Contribution of Household Chaos and Fatigue to Maternal Stress. Journal of Child and Family Studies, 34 (4). pp. 909-919.
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Abstract
Parenting stress can be detrimental to child outcomes and there is evidence that both parental fatigue and household chaos are associated with the stress experienced by parents. There has been little investigation of the relative contributions these variables make to stress and even less consideration of the changes that may occur in the impact of and associations among these variables as children mature. This study explored the contribution of fatigue and household chaos to parental stress in a large sample of Australian mothers of children and adolescents. Participants completed the Parental Stress Scale, the Fatigue Assessment Scale and the Confusion, Hubbub and Order Scale. There was no group difference on the measure of stress. While parents of young children reported slightly higher levels of fatigue and household chaos than those of adolescents, effect sizes were small. Household chaos contributed to maternal stress over and above the impact of fatigue; however, there was a complex interaction between the effect of chaos and fatigue on stress. As the level of chaos increased, the impact of fatigue on maternal stress decreased. This interaction was not moderated by child age. As the data were collected during the COVID-19 pandemic, our considerations of the results of the study include some speculation about the influence of this on our results.
| Item ID: | 88174 |
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| Item Type: | Article (Research - C1) |
| ISSN: | 1573-2843 |
| Keywords: | Chaos, Disorganization, Fatigue, Mothers, Parents, Stress |
| Copyright Information: | This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ |
| Date Deposited: | 04 Feb 2026 02:27 |
| FoR Codes: | 52 PSYCHOLOGY > 5203 Clinical and health psychology > 520399 Clinical and health psychology not elsewhere classified @ 100% |
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