CARE FOR SELF

Descriptors

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Caring for oneself means knowing and understanding oneself, managing life's demands, and establishing clear direction. Although not impacting children directly, Care for Self provides a backdrop of security, support, predictability, and purpose that indirectly influences the lives of everyone in the family. For example, a parent who has established a sense of purpose in parenting will be more comfortable establishing criteria for choosing guidance strategies. A parent who is motivated in her or his own life will be more capable of motivating a child. And a parent who feels interpersonally connected and supported will find it natural to nurture a child.

While Care for Self does not necessarily precede other parenting practices, it is quite possible to begin developing these skills before an individual becomes a parent. In many cases, these self-care concerns must be addressed before a parent can begin to concentrate on the child and the behaviors more directly related to parenthood.

Care for Self is closely connected with Advocate, a cluster of skills that enable parents to reach out to other institutions and the community. Care for Self focuses on the parent's needs and well-being while Advocate focuses on the needs of the child. Caring for oneself is not only a critical parenting skill, but a skill for life.

Critical Care for Self Practices

• Manage personal stress.
• Manage family resources.
• Offer support to other parents.
• Ask for and accept support from others when needed.
• Recognize one's own personal and parenting strengths.
• Have a sense of purpose in setting child-rearing goals.
• Cooperate with one's child-rearing partners.

Examples of Specific Program Objectives for Care For Self

The following parent behaviors serve as examples of more specific outcome objectives based on the critical practices for Care for Self:

• Identify three personal signs and sources of stress.
• Describe four different methods for coping with stress and four methods for reducing stress.
• Set a specific goal for improved time management.
• Create and follow a household budget.
• Identify five formal and informal sources of personal parenting support.
• Establish a balance between support that is offered to others and support that is requested from others.
• Report an increased number of personal parenting strengths.
• Report increased parenting self-confidence.
• Define four goals for one's parenting "career."
• Identify six principles that guide their decisions in parenting.
• Discuss three parenting issues with the child's other parent(s) or parent figure(s) and set shared goals.
• Demonstrate effective communication strategies for dealing with value.

What We Know about Care for Self

Minor parenting hassles, not only major life events, appear to be important sources of stress. Experiencing many daily hassles is associated with more child behavior problems, lower social competence, and greater maternal stress. Daily parenting hassles include, for example, interruptions and disruptions due to parenting, the child's nagging or irritability, and the constant need to perform routine tasks. Hassles predicted less responsive and more controlling child behavior during interaction. Both friendship and community support consistently acted to moderate the relationship between daily hassles and the mother's interaction with the child. The data indicated that mothers need both instrumental and emotional support from husbands/partners (Crnic and Greenberg, 1990).

Isolation and limited contact with social support systems are factors in troubled families. High-risk, multi-problem families tend to have networks that are smaller than average. There is a dynamic relationship between individuals and their environment which is influenced by the richness of their support network (Saulnier and Rowland, 1985). Cochran and Henderson (1990) found that mothers' perceptions of their children became more positive as a function of how many kinfolk they included in their primary network. This relationship was strongest for mothers who had less than a high school education.

Close relationships lead to a secure base from which an individual can cope with stress. Support effectiveness may depend on the degree to which there is a match between the particular support function and individual needs. People expect exchange of support (reciprocity) and have expectations regarding the provision of support (trust). Support needs and partners' abilities to meet needs change over time and situation. Under conditions of duress, a supportive person can provide a secure base for a distressed parent (Coffman et al., 1991). Supportive, close relationships serve as "buffers" to stress that might otherwise cause a breakdown in effective parenting (Quinton, Rutter, and Liddle, 1984).

Social support is especially critical for adolescent parents. There is substantial evidence that social support is positively related to the quality of care teen mothers provide for their children (Luster and Mittelstaedt, 1993). Support from the family of origin is often found to be more important than boyfriend or spouse support in influencing maternal attitudes and skills. Becoming a parent may place a teen out of synchrony with other life course transitions. Developmental tasks of adolescents as individuals and as parents are contradictory (Nath et al., 1991).

Many low-income families are able to maintain supportive networks, but large networks can be a liability. The source of support itself can be a stressor. Supportive networks are an essential element of survival in very low-income neighborhoods. Social support also can be a source of stress, however. For example, mothers of adolescent parents may provide essential child care of their grandchildren while undermining their daughters' independence. It is important to consider the source of support; the frequency of contact; qualitative differences in types of support, such as emotional/supportive, instrumental/material, information/referral, as well as the extent of reciprocity in the relationship. The type of help that is needed most may be a function of a person's situation, but what actually is available may depend on the nature of the network. The quality of the contacts predicted whether or not parents maltreated their children. Only those mothers who perceived others as willing and able to meet their needs and who saw themselves as competent to enlist their help were judged by others in the group to be parenting adequately. It also was important that they were able to establish reciprocal relationships and express empathy (Crittenden, 1985).

Mothers who are more satisfied with their personal networks and those with larger "maternal networks" (systems of support specifically for parenting) show more parenting skill, while those who view children as acting out and report low rates of supportive social contact have less frequent prosocial mother-child interaction. Although personal and maternal networks overlap, mothers tend to have larger personal networks than maternal ones. Concerning their maternal networks, they tend to be more satisfied with the help offered directly to their children and less satisfied with the advice they receive. Those who are more satisfied with their networks report a greater sense of well-being and have been observed to be more likely to praise their children and are less intrusive (Jennings et al., 1991; Szykula et al., 1991).

Parents living with adult relatives may not develop strong parenting skills. It is better if those other adults provide educative rather than exploitative support. Richardson et al., (1991) called this a "developmental double bind." Support is important, and living with other adult relatives can help parents attain various types of crucial support, but it also may make it difficult for young parents to develop maturity and parenting competence. Furstenberg (1981) identified two patterns of support from families: educative and exploitative. In examining families with teen parents, it is possible to identify parents who help the teens to care for their children and gradually allow them to take over the jobs they can handle. In contrast, other families assume responsibility for all tasks and do not allow the teen autonomy or decision-making power. Clearly, educative support helps the teen mother to assume responsibility when she is ready (Barratt, et al., 1991).

There is a "norm of reciprocity" that may make it difficult for some parents to accept support from others. The norm of reciprocity assumes that someone who receives help from others will eventually return the favor. This means that people who believe they will not be able to return the favor may not seek help. Unfortunately, people with the fewest resources to help others may be the most in need of help from others. This norm appears to be less important with family and intimate relationships (Shumaker and Brownell, 1984).

Support social networks are important for African American family life as well as other different ethnic groups. Support from friends, church members, neighbors, and co-workers positively influence self-esteem and personal efficacy, parent-child relationships, and the ability to deal with social problems. Extrafamilial support is associated with socialization responsibility and child care for men regardless of ethnic group (Ahmeduzzaman and Roopnarine, 1992).

Parents who provide mutual support will seek consensus in important decisions about childrearing. When parents use incompatible approaches with their children, the children may show lower self-esteem, problems adapting to school, and lower school achievement. Mothers and fathers may respond differently to developmental changes and demands and display incongruent or disparate patterns of control and influence. Child-rearing disagreements between parents are correlated with behavior problems in three- to six-year-olds (Jouriles et al., 1991) as well as older children (Kandel, 1990). Adolescents are more likely than younger children to notice the difference between their parents (Johnson et al., 1991).