Parental Self-Care

A key part of the assessment is to help parents to understand the importance of managing their own self-care needs. By creating a basic understanding of the nervous system and how it influences our daily functioning (emotional, physical, and psychological functioning), practitioners help parents to reflect on the importance of managing their own needs so they can consistently and predictably respond to their to child/ren's needs.

Practitioners help parents to understand the basic role and importance of the Sympathetic Nervous System, and the Parasympathetic Nervous System.

Sympathetic Nervous System (SNS)

As stated by Deb Dana (2021), the energy of the SNS is vital for our ability to move through the world. For example, it has a regulating role in pumping blood around the body, managing heart rhythm, and regulating breath patterns.

When we move out of safety and into perceived danger, we move into sympathetic survival. This means that our bodies begin to release cortisol and adrenaline, enabling our bodies to be in a state of fight or flight (a state of mobilization).

Parasympathetic Nervous System (PNS)

According to Porges and Porges (2023), the PNS is what enables us to slow down our bodies, and it is our rest and relax system. It is activated when we feel safe and it enables us to remain calm, collected and social.

Body Budget

By using a concept coined by Lisa Feldman Barrett (2018), practitioners help parents to identify the habits and rituals in their daily lives that enable them to manage their Body Budget. For the purpose of the assessment, the Body Budget refers to the physical and emotional resources and activities that a parent needs to enable them to function at their optimal level as an individual, and subsequently as a parent. This might include a parent identifying the need to sleep a certain amount of hours per night, exercise being important for their emotional and physical health, or they might identify the importance of finding time to relax.

"If a community values its children, it must cherish its mothers"
John Bowlby