By addressing their own needs, parents add an integral and often missing piece to the puzzle of understanding their development and how it impacts the development of the children they nurture. Visualize yourself as a composite picture, or puzzle, with many pieces whose outline will change frequently. Then begin to actively investigate your own growth and development. This leads to self-nurturance and models the importance of understanding and caring for the SELF. In other words… if you care for yourself you will do a better job of being, parenting and partnering.

To encourage self-nurturance, I like the notion of creating a personal survival kit – either concrete or conceptual. It needs to be consciously individualized. It will contain strategies, ideas, information, and items which assist individuals in their personal development and in coping with day to day stresses. By creating such a kit, parents will begin to meet their own needs in an emotionally intense family and enable themselves to better meet the needs of others. A sample survival kit might include some of the following:

• A place to retreat to
• Items which make your environment comforting ( plants, posters, poetry, art, photographs, stuffed animals, books, food or water, music)
• A file of affirmations which will support you and your growth, i.e.
  • Respect yourself, your efforts, your feelings, and your unique needs
  • Give yourself permission to be a growing changing person
  • “Give me the grace to accept with serenity the things that cannot be changed, courage to change the things which should be changed, and the wisdom to distinguish the one from the other.” Reinhold Niebuhr, 1934
  • Part of defining the self is knowing what you won’t do
• A list of small luxuries which revitalize you; rewards you will give yourself for small successes – (reading, seeing a movie, napping, sharing with a friend, being alone, visiting an art gallery, window shopping, getting a manicure, playing golf, etc.)
• A network of human resources who can provide individualized and specific kinds of support
  (see Simon, S.B., 1988, Getting unstuck: Breaking through your barriers to change)
  
  • Chicken soup people – those who console you
  • Comic-relief givers
  • Great distracters – those who physically, emotionally, intellectually get you away from the situation
  • Crisis corps – those who help pick up the pieces and provide calm support in the short term
  • Listeners – those who listen, but don’t solve or critique
  • Problem solvers & advisors
  • Door openers – those who know where to find the answer or who can find help
  • Similar situation a few times myself person – those who have actually experienced your situation
  • Unconditional acceptors
  • Professional helpers, counselors
• The ability to determine problem ownership and act accordingly (many parents take on their children’s or partner’s problems as their own)
  • Address a problem knowing the answers to these questions
  • Whose problem is it?
  • Who is experiencing difficulty with whom?
  • Whose purposes are not being met?
  • Use these examples to help determine ownership
  • Other’s Problem -- if the other is thwarted in satisfying a need and other’s behavior does not interfere with you
  • Your Problem -- if the other’s behavior is interfering with you and the other is satisfying own needs
  • No Problem -- if the other is satisfied and the other’s behavior is not interfering with yours
  • After determining ownership, either take responsibility and proceed with problem solving, ask the person with the problem if they wish assistance, or do nothing
• A list of resources to help you and to help you parent and partner (see www.DavidsonGifted.org/DB)
• A stress management plan (see www.DavidsonGifted.org/DB)

Obviously each survival kit will be different, will be developed over time, and will be flexible. It can be private or shared, as you wish. It is a concept usable with adults and children. It reflects the knowledge that respecting yourself begets respecting others and others respecting you.

This article is provided as a service of the Davidson Institute for Talent Development, a 501(c)3 nonprofit dedicated to supporting profoundly gifted young people 18 and under. To learn more about the Davidson Institute’s programs, please visit www.DavidsonGifted.org.