How to make a child structure reference a member of its parent?

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In this project I'm working on I have one struct that holds several other smaller structs. All the child structs need a reference to the one common resource. I was thinking the best way to do this is to make this shared resource a member of the parent struct and pass a reference to all the children, but now I don't know exactly how to do this rust. I've written a smaller example gist to show what I'm thinking. libs.rs · GitHub

In the example Outside is the parent struct, ToRef is what I want to be the shared resource and Inside is the child. What I really want to do is hand a reference to Outside::b to inside but I don't know if that's possible. Any tips?

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Also I know I can use Arc to share this, but that doesn't seem like it should be necessary.

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I think you may find this SO answer useful: rust - Why can't I store a value and a reference to that value in the same struct? - Stack Overflow.

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FWIW, the rental crate allows one to create a structure which stores both the owned value and a reference to it: https://github.com/jpernst/rental.

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I appreciate the update on this! Whats funny is this exact topic came up again today.

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