-Take a deep breath. Remember, your child is going to take their cues from you. If you freak out or act as though the world is coming to an end, so will they. Be sure to schedule time for yourself to deal with the news either alone or with your partner. Decide how you will approach diabetes as a family unit rather than take sole responsibility. -Remember to deal with the regular child stuff as well as the diabetes. Just because diabetes has been thrown in to the mix, doesn’t mean that all the usual childhood issues and problems have suddenly disappeared. Make sure that you give the other components of your child’s life attention and don’t just focus on the diabetes symptoms. -Be their advocate. The medical community will become your lifeline and your partner as you all work to create a management plan for your child. Remember, that you are your child’s representative and that they will rely on you to seek out the best level of care available. Signing your child up for every clinical trial may not be in their best interest and you may need to advocate for their proper care while they attend school. Don’t wait for problems to arise before you learn about diabetic foot care and diabetic skin care. Be proactive and keep up to date on what’s happening in the diabetic community. -Join a diabetes support group. Simply being able to meet other children like themselves and see how other families successfully navigate the diabetic challenge can go a long way towards alleviating both of your fears and anxieties. Some groups can pair newly diagnosed individuals and families with a mentor to ease their learning curve and provide some of the non medical answers that you need to know. -Make it easy by stocking appropriate foods. It is one thing to be told that you can’t reach into the snack cupboard without approval, but it is even more devastating to see the rest of the family carrying on as usual. Having healthy food choices on the diabetic diet and posting their values and the proper boluses of insulin needed to digest them properly will help. What will help even more is cracking down on other family members that are thoughtlessly scavenging snacks rather than making healthy eating choices. -Involve the family in the research and learning. Getting the whole family on the healthy eating band wagon and having them learn how to identify problematic symptoms and their treatment will increase your child’s chances of successfully management. This approach will ensure that no one person holds all of the responsibility and knowledge and will also prevent the non-diabetic children from feeling left out or ignored. -Don’t focus on the potential dangers but don’t gloss over them. Children need to know why they need to pay close attention to the signals their body is giving, but they don’t need that done with a heavy handed scare tactic. Too much emphasis on long term diabetes complications and dangers will impede their ability to rationally deal with diabetes and not become hyper vigilant to the exclusion of everything else.
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