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A Questionnaire Measuring Parents ' Self Compassion Of Parents Using A Likert Scale With 29 Items

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Parents often report elevated stress level and a constant feeling of self-sacrifice (Crow, 1998); yet for a functioning lifestyle, parents must show compassion not just to their children, but also to themselves. Self-compassion, therefore, involves being touched by and being open to one’s own suffering, not avoiding or disconnecting from it, generating the desire to alleviate one’s suffering and to heal oneself with kindness. The present study is a questionnaire measuring parents’ self-compassion of parents using a Likert scale with 29 items that fall into four different areas and will, therefore, produce 4 different scores (Likert, 1932): self-kindness, mindfulness, common humanity and overall self-compassion. The scale is significant…show more content…
While there is no need to see ‘common humanity’ in an overall positive light – people can be compassionate towards their friends and not embrace the rather abstract term of ‘humanity’ – it is nevertheless necessary to know how forgiving a person in general is. The third item is the diametrically opposite: self-kindness. While humanity is abstract and outwards directed, self-kindness is concrete and inward (Reyes, 2012; Raab, 2014). One would expect a negative correlation between the stance towards humanity and how one sees oneself. For that reason, sub-scores for self-kindness are counted in reverse order in contrast to the other three areas. The fourth area, however, is the real significant area, because it evaluates mindfulness, a Buddhist concept to the very core (Huynh et al., 2007; Dahl et al., 2015). ‘Mindfulness’ lets us measure self-compassion with some accuracy because of this parameter measures if one is ready to accept reality as it is. Only if we aren’t defensive against the things that happen in our life, only if we accept what are there can we be compassionate towards ourselves, without judgment, without any attachment to an ego and emotional distress towards items we do not have the power to change (Hanh, 2016)? These areas and the included questions were inspired by principles from meditation and principles of presence and mindfulness. This means not letting our emotions define and explain external events to us, but completely embracing them
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