Coping with Your Diabetic Child
As you learn to help your child regulate his or her body chemistry for a healthier life, remember to do what your physician and health care team advise. Friends and relatives will offer well meaning advice and suggestions that may be based on something they read or heard and mayor mar not be applicable to your child’s condition. Control of your child’s diabetes will depend on proper diet, emotional stability, well regulated insulin injections, exercise, and regular glucose testing. Families that have adjusted well to caring for a diabetic child do not make the child’s diabetes a central concern to the family and do not need to change the entire family’s lifestyle. If you set reasonable goals for diet, testing, exercise, and self-care, your child will adapt to the situation with flexibility and good humor, and so will others in the family. The best assistance you can give your child or adolescent with diabetes is to keep calm and not express constant concern over every detail of the management of the diabetes. Your matter-of fact attitude will rub off on your child. If you accept the additional activities of daily living related to diabetic care as part of the family routine, so will your child. Your child should come to view diabetic care as an un-complicating and uncomplicated aspect of life. If your child takes injections, he William to view the minor discomfort as part of his regular day, just as he accepts daily hygiene routines, occasional skinned knees, falls from his bicycle, and other cuts and bruises. If you express too much sympathy for occasional discomfort, your child may begin to feel sorry for himself and thus have a harder time taking the injections and caring for himself.
Children with diabetes should not be permitted to use their disease as a frequent excuse for avoiding special lessons, taking the school bus, or other situations. Of course, occasional head. aches or sick spells may occur just as they do in non diabetic children. However, you should encourage the diabetic child to learn to view illness as something to overcome, not something to hide behind. If you, as the parent, are not overprotective and encourage carrying on routine activities despite some occasional under par feelings, your child will develop a mature outlook toward living with diabetes.
Encourage your child to follow his or her physician’s recommendations to take the daily injections of insulin at the same time each day, using the correct dosage. A common cause of poor diabetic control is changing the time of day for the injection and taking an incorrect dose of the injection. Frequent and unnecessary changes may cause blood sugar to become too low and then go too high.
Additionally your doctor may recommend that you do not adjust the amount of insulin on days when your child expects more activity than usual. Instead, you can give the child additional food before he or she engages in heavy sports activities. Also, the child may keep some extra food handy in case of an insulin reaction (low blood sugar) during a game or strenuous activity.
Overall, your role in coping with your diabetic child will be supportive but should not be overindulgent, Encourage self-care and participation in routine activities. However, two medical emergencies may require quick action on your part: hypoglycemia (low blood sugar) and ketoacidosis (diabetic coma). There may be times when you suspect that either of these reactions is taking place. If you suspect low blood sugar, use a self-monitoring blood glucose test, if you can. Or use a urine test for acetone, a sign of possible ketoacidosis. Ketones do not always indicate ketoacidosis, as it may result from emotional stress, diet, exercise, and especially low blood sugar. Your health care team will give you specific instructions to follow if these conditions occur.
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