Parenting Children With Diabetes

Abstract

Perhaps no psychosocial issue has resulted in the production of more popular literature than that of parenting. There are books on parenting infants and toddlers (e.g., Touchpoints ), adolescents (e.g., Romance of Risk and Get Out of My Life ), difficult children (e.g., Raising Your Spirited Child and Your Defiant Child ), boys (e.g., Raising Cain and Real Boys ), girls (e.g., Reviving Ophelia and Brave New Girls ), and children with specific problems (e.g., Taking Charge of ADHD and The Bipolar Child ). Indeed, there seems to be a parenting book for just about every type of child. Not surprisingly, there are also books about how best to parent children and adolescents with chronic illnesses such as diabetes (e.g., Raising a Child With Diabetes and The Ten Keys to Helping Your Child Grow Up With Diabetes ). We have learned from seminal articles on family and diabetes1,2 that family is an important aspect of life for children and adolescents with diabetes and that parenting is one aspect of family life that can affect and be affected by a child’s diabetes. However, recent research3 has debunked the conventional wisdom that parenting directly affects behavior. This research suggests that a child’s behavior is the result of the “interrelated effects of parenting, nonfamilial influences, and the role of the broader context in which families live.”3 Clearly, different parenting styles affect children differently and, in turn, affect behavior. The effects of various parenting styles on the behavior and psychosocial functioning of children with diabetes remains a complex issue. While one may think that there are innumerable ways to parent, Maccoby and Martin4 identified four core parenting styles. They proposed that parenting is either child-centered or parent-centered and that parents either place a great deal of demand or little demand on their children.4 …