Trust and Predictability - We all know that routines are important for developing feelings of trust and security. Think about routines and relationships between you and your family and friends. How much do they keep to a pattern? Will your child begin each day with a reasonably clear idea of what will happen and when?

Competence - Being good at things. We all have different talents and abilities. We need to help our children identify things they are good at and encourage them. These skills fall into a couple of different catagories.

Practical: Seeing how to make or mend things, and build things

Physical: Good at sports, kicking or catching a ball, swimming, running

Mental: Good ideas about things, good at solving practical problems, good at schoolwork

Social: Good at playing with others, kind and considerate, good at making new friends

Process: Being good at tying new things, sticking with difficult tasks and so on

Sociability - Trust and develope their social skills. Involve them moderately in your social life. If we have our children with us it shows not only are we happy to have them with us but also that we trust they will behave appropriately. Getting used to being in new situations, and learning to talk to different people will increase our children's confidence considerably. Here's one that took me a while to figure out. Give your child advance warning of your feelings, of short temper, tiredness, sadness, or whatever. "I've had a lousy day at work and I'm very crabby. It might be smart to keep your head down and your mouth shut." Or "I've had an argument with so and so and I'm feeling hurt. If I'm short with you I'm sorry." This not only teaches them techniques for managing their own feelings, but gives them a chance to learn sensitivity to feelings and moods of others. These are essential social skills not only for now but for later on in life.

Our children will develope self-confidence only if we have first shown trust and confidence in them and have given them an environment where they can predict and trust. Diabetes and all of unpredictability, feelings of powerlessness, and exclusion that sometimes go with it just make this process that much more difficult. I look at it like if it was easy any idiot could do it. Well, we're not just any idiot. We're special idiots. We have been entrusted with care and upbringing of a diabetic child. So remember you are a special person entrusted with a very special task. Trust yourself. It's okay to do it your way.

In next issue I'll take a look at Self-Reliance.

Self-Reliant at What?

We can encourage self-reliance in our children from a fairly early age. As soon as your child shows they can manage things for themselves, however slowly or clumsily, we should allow them to do so. Self-reliance is best introduced and experienced stage by stage, starting early and building up slowly as they become more more competent and responsible. When children are very young they have this almost unstoppable drive to become independent. Before they learn adult concepts of failure, they are willing to try over and over until they master whatever they are trying to do. This is especially true if they have older brothers or sisters. They desprately want to do what older kids can do. If we stand in way of letting them try or show disapproval when they don't do it quite right we can damage their belief in themselves. The more we do for them more we prevent them from developing ability to make judgements and decisions for themselves. The stages of self-reliance are fun to watch. The first time your baby grabs a hand full of baby food and finds their own mouth with it. When they learn to "go potty" all by themselves. When they put their own shirt on, usually backwards after wrestling with it for ten minutes. When they pick up their own room. When they start to earn an allowance. When they do their homework without you holding a gun to their head. When they go off on their first baby-sitting job. When they show you their first apartment, where you should promptly go through it turning on and leaving on every light in place, leave refridgerator door open and put your feet up on their new furniture. These stages progress until they present you one day with a grandchild. Clearly you cannot encourage self-reliance in your child if you are not prepared to stand back and progressively let go. Doing that in right amounts and at right times is hard to judge. Add dangers of their not managing daily diabetes treatment into it and you realize just how careful you need to be. Giving them responsibility and independence depends on age and personality of your child and on your own particular circumstances. Children can become self-reliant only if we have encouraged their independence, given them practice in making decisions that concern themselves and their health, and shown them that they can be relied upon.

We have been given a special task, raising a diabetic child. This makes us special people. If we weren't up to it we wouldn't have been entrusted with it. Self-reliance is a critical part of raising any child, diabetic or not. Diabetes just makes it more difficult and more important we help our children develope this skill.

Next month I'll talk about Self-Control.