Our compassion resilience work began with individuals, primarily in schools, healthcare settings and youth-serving organizations. Teachers and nurses would come up to us afterwards and share how helpful this was not only in their professional lives, but for them as parents and caregivers. This feedback from the community prompted us to develop the parent and caregiver compassion resilience toolkit. The content of the toolkit has been strongly informed by research and best practices related to resilience, positive psychology, compassion fatigue, family development, and mindfulness. Parent advocates, family specialists, and child educators worked with us to shape this toolkit and to pilot it with multiple groups of parents and caregivers. These pilots reinforced what we had been hearing – that indeed parents and caregivers want to explore the topics herein together!
Compassion is the combination of the consciousness of others’ distress and a desire to alleviate it. It is a basic quality needed to best support the needs of our children and family. Resilience is the ability to recover and continue in the face of adversity without being overwhelmed or acting in dysfunctional ways. If our goal is to lessen our child’s distress while maintaining our well-being, we can seek to grow our compassion resilience.
This toolkit will explore the protective factors that build and maintain compassion resilience for parents and caregivers.