Is It A Good Idea?

Is It A Good Idea?

I believe every parent who has a child with diabetes will experience this at some point in their child’s life. When the testing frequently becomes an issue.

I use to believe it would get easier as they got older, I no longer think that way. When our children are young we have virtual control over everything they eat, how often they test and even though there’s just no controlling diabetes we at least could fool ourselves into thinking that we had a handle on what was going on.

Then that fateful day comes when our children go off to the Middle Schools and are pretty much responsible for their daily testing of blood sugars during the day. You would think that a child who has had diabetes all of their life would just automatically remember to test before eating, when feeling high or low. Now that they are away from us and taking on more control of their diabetes I long for the way to make this a positive experience. I am tired of the hounding text messages checking to see if my child is testing, if she remembered to bolus, then downloading meters and pumps only to find out that what I thought the numbers were are not quite the same as the ones I downloaded.

So my question is this, with the New Year Approaching, I am adapting a new strategy! I will be looking at the pump each day to ensure proper testing and blousing, at the end of the week if we have had 4 days (I have to allow a day for the oops I forgot) of doing what we need to do than we will be giving out a reward, something fun like movie tickets, a trip to Target or something else that is special for a job well done.

So do you think it’s a good idea to reward our children for taking on the responsibility and care of their diabetes? I will let you know our results, Remember our kids are kids first and as hard as it is we still need to make teaching them what they need to do a positive experience.