How Can you Help your Child Gain Independence With Diabetes?

Insulin-dependent diabetics often require regular injections as part of the disease management and treatment scheme. While your child is young, you will be left in charge of making sure he or she doesn’t fall below an adequate blood sugar level. It is often the case that parents are reluctant to let their children out of their sight, and with diabetes this becomes more the case. How can you help your child gain a sense of independence, while ensuring that their medical needs are catered for in society?

Support from all angles

Diabetes treatment support for those dealing with diabetes symptoms needs to come from all angles, especially from academic institutions where your child will be spending the majority of the daytime. Under new guidelines, some schools are upping their nursing facilities to deal with the support gap when parents need to get some work in and diabetes symptoms are at their most exposed. Schools in California will be required to have someone available who is trained to assist diabetic children under a legal settlement just concluded this month. The agreement sets a policy requiring children who have diabetes symptoms to be provided services under federal laws that guarantee equal educational opportunities for children with disabilities.

Plugging the gaps in school nursing

Statistics exist that show one in every 500 young people under the age of twenty having diabetes symptoms in the United States. A few states, including Indiana, Oklahoma and Texas, already have legislation that allows schools’ non-medical staff members to be trained to administer insulin and help children monitor blood-sugar levels. In the absence of a nurse, schools require parents to give insulin or other medical services if the child is unable to do it. School districts and nurses have insisted that only nurses can provide insulin diabetes treatment to children. California has 2,800 full-time nurses in 9,000 schools, making there not enough nurses to go around. Federal guidelines call for one nurse per 750 students to put diabetes treatment into practice.

Equality under the law

Parents naturally get extremely nervous about sending their kids to school without the guaranteed support of nursing officers capable of carrying out diabetes treatment. But with a new wave of understanding of the problem of diabetes and other less obvious medical problems, no longer should parents feel the need to pull out of their jobs and sell their homes. Equality for diabetics is becoming more entrenched in society, protected at a federal level and enforced in the states. The new policy also says schools can’t bar children from performing blood-sugar testing or require children with diabetes to attend a particular school. In essence, they can’t be treated any differently from other students.

Natural diabetes therapies complementing medication

Aside from support in taking their diabetes medication, children need to get lifestyle coaching that will last them through their lives, so that they don’t allow their bodies to get out of sink for avoidable reasons. Natural therapies cannot cure type 1 Diabetes, but can complement other diabetes treatments and may help by making the body more receptive to insulin supplied by injection. It is particularly critical for people with type 1 Diabetes to work carefully with the doctor prescribing insulin before contemplating the use of any herbs, supplements, or dietary changes mentioned in this article. Any change that makes the body more receptive to insulin could require critical changes in insulin dosage that must be determined by the physician treating your child’s diabetes.