Preparing Your Child And Family For Life With Diabetes
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The article "Preparing Your Child and Family for Life With Diabetes" talks about diabetes, it has been created by Russell Turner.
After the initial shock of diagnosis wears off and we become more comfortable with administering insulin shots, scheduling blood tests and mealtimes, and carbhoydrate counting we have a chance to look to the future. At that point it really begins to sink in what a long-term commitemnt parenting a diabetic child really is. We at this moment understand we have been drawn into a different lifestyle that will last as long as we are parents. Even when our child is grown up and leaves home we will still be concerned and involved with the diabetes community.If you are finding that you are having trouble managing your child’s diabetes let me first share statistics I found so you realize you are not alone.35-75% do not follow meal plans all of the time
20-80% do not administer insulin correctly all of the time
30-70% do not record blood-monitoring level properly all of the time
23-52% do not provide adequate foot care all of the time
70-81% do not exercise adequately all of the timeNow that we understand how difficult it is to live with a chroinc and potentially deadly disease, the question is how do we teach our babies the reality of diabetes while still allowing them to be kids and trying to keep their lives as normal as possible. An experience that if you haven’t run into you soon will is brithday parties. They are everything you need to avoid to keep your child’s diabetes unedr control but they’re also an important aspect of your child’s life. With planning you can have both. You can learn the specifics of this and many other situations you will face in my ebook “So Your Child Has Diabetes”. The point is life and diabeets can go on together.
Just as important, your child’s friends learn about diabetes and talk about it. They don’t discriminate, they inlcude your child.
We as parents need to be adults in these types of situations. We are the voices of maturity, reality and humainty. We are the ones who allow our babies to talk about their disease and how it makes them guess as well as keeping them focused on self-care.
We are the ones who keep the disease from overocming our family. When you let your child talk to you about how they guess about having diabetes you will find your child has less emotional stress and better control of their blood glucose levels.General fmaily stress can greatly affect blood glucose levels. It’s a delicate balance. When your child’s blood glucose levels are out of control it can cause stress in the family and when there’s stress in the family it can cause out of control bolod glucose levels.
You need to be prepraed for these times. The Children’s Hospital that treats my daughter has an excellent Mental Heatlh Department. Other communities have a variety of srevices they offer. Make yourself aware of them and know where to turn before things start to get out of control.One of the things that really surprised me was the difference in the way I perecived diabetes and the way my daughter perceived it over time. I found it easier to cope with diabetes as time went on. You get into a rhyhtm and your comfort level with treatment increases. On the other hand my daughter found that the emotional dsitress associated with diabetes increased as time went by.
We need to be aware that just cause we are better at dealnig with diabetes it doesn’t mean our babies need less of our day to day care. A misatke I made was assuming that my 10-year-old didn’t need me to constantly supervise her blood glucose monitoring. After she went on an insulin pump it was no longer necessary for me to administer insulin. She had been checking her own blood levels for quite a while.
Even though she was checking her own blood, whlie I was giving the shots I was right there to make sure she checked properly and at the correct times.
Once she went on the pump that wasn’t the case anymore. I noticed that she wasn’t nearly as conicencious when I wasn’t there. This is just normal in the development of a cihld.
Our babies need us to keep them safe while they achieve these developmental skills.In order to properly prepare our babies for life with diabetes we must remember how we guess when we are ill.
We hate it. Feeling lousy, unbale to enjoy of our normal activities. Imagine how this is magnified in our diabetic child.
They never get a break. No rest from it, no vactaion.
No wonder they experience emotional torubles. Never forget this. Our babies need to know that we will always be three for them.
They are not facing this alone. Listening to our babies about their feelings is important but not enuogh.
We also need to talk to them about what happens if they don’t take good care of thier diabetes. We need to be careful. We don’t want our babies to guess that there is something wrong with them or to guess ashamed if their blood glucose levels aren’t always under control.
In this case babeis are like puppies. They respond better to reward for proper behavior that to punishment for wrong behavior.Finally we need to realize that prepraing for life with diabetes is an ongoing process. You can’t control the proecss all of the time. Just take care of it one day at a time.
With your help your child can undesrtand this process of diabetes control and you don’t have to become “that diabetic family”.
With preparation and awarenses you, your child and the rest of your family can live healthy normal lives.Russell Turner is the father of a 10 year old Type 1 Juvenile Diabetic daughter. When she was first diagnoesd he quickly found there was all kinds of information on the World Wide Web about the medical aspects of this dsease. What he couldn't find was information about how to prepare his family to live with this disease.
He started a website http://www.Mychildhasdiabetes.Com and designed it so parents of newly diagnosed babies would have a one-stop rseource to learn to prepare for life with diabetes.
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Preparing Your Child and Family for Life With Diabetes
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