Parental Involvement in Adolescents’ Diabetes Management

Abstract

Parents of adolescents with type 1 diabetes are involved in a challenging transition: the transfer of primary responsibility for diabetes management from themselves to their children. During this transitional period, experts advocate for continuing parental involvement in adolescents’ diabetes management to achieve better metabolic control.1 However, “miscarried helping” by parents can be detrimental to parent-adolescent relationships and adolescents’ development of competence, ultimately affecting diabetes management.2 Greater knowledge of the ways in which parents are involved (performing tasks, making decisions, providing support, and communicating) would be beneficial to health care professionals providing guidance to parents of adolescents with diabetes. Thus, the purpose of this preliminary study was to examine parents’ perceptions of specific ways they are involved in the management of their adolescents’ type 1 diabetes. Research on parental involvement in diabetes management has focused on parents’ performance of diabetes tasks, which decreases during their children’s adolescence.3,4 This is congruent with literature documenting that adolescents seek autonomy and their parents decrease their authority.5 However, research has focused only on performance and has not examined decision making, which, like performance, is considered an important aspect of behavioral autonomy.6 Additional information is needed regarding parental involvement in adolescents’ diabetes management decision making. Parental involvement in performance of diabetes management has had a positive impact on diabetes outcomes for young adolescents. Parental involvement has been associated with better diabetes management among 10- to 15-year-olds3 and better metabolic control among 12- to 16-year-olds.7 Further, when families experienced an intervention to enhance parental involvement, adolescents (10–15 years of age) achieved better metabolic control.1 However, there is a paucity of research on parental involvement among older adolescents with diabetes. Providing support to adolescents is one way that parents can be involved while still promoting their adolescents’ development …