Parent Time

When your child has a chronic health condition, you have lots to do: mostly look after your kid and learn as much as you can about their illness or disability so you can do it well. But there’s another thing you have to do — talk to people about it. That can take up surprising amounts of emotional energy. Not only do you have to provide basic information, you have to correct misconceptions, endure well-intentioned but ignorant advice or suffer judgmental comments.

Type 1 vs. Tpe 2

Our son has type 1 diabetes (a.k.a. juvenile diabetes), a disease that is subject to huge misconceptions. One is that people don’t understand the difference between type 1 and type 2, which leads to all manner of misunderstanding. Another is that diabetic kids can’t eat sugar (or that they got it from eating too much sugar).

Type 2 is the kind that generally comes later in life and is linked to lifestyle — excessive weight, poor diet, lack of exercise. Type 1 comes out of nowhere. The cause is unknown, it’s not preventable and it’s not caused by poor lifestyle.

Originally published in Today's Parent, February 2010