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• Discussing diabetes with adolescents
• Navigating the adolescent years
• Diabetes and alcohol experimentation

Discussing diabetes with adolescents

Adolescents need the most sophisticated information and are typically involved in most conversations with medical staff and decisions concerning treatment.  Abstract thinking is a hallmark of adolescents and many teenage children will be asking many “why” questions and experience concerns about the future.  Whether newly diagnosed or diagnosed with diabetes for many years, adolescence is the period of time which has been most consistently linked with adherence difficulties.  Open communication between parents and teenagers about daily treatment regimen behaviors has been shown to improve adherence.      

-Lauren Mednick, PhD, Clinical Psychologist, Department of Psychiatry

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Navigating the adolescent years

There is a period when kids are young enough that they do what they’re told to do. They’re easier to get along with and their diabetes is easy to control. Then during the adolescent years, parents and kids have to navigate the whole process of adolescence, which is normally a period of exploration and of challenging authority. The regimentation and restrictions of diabetes back up against the natural biological process of adolescence. Taking risks and doing crazy things can sometimes be very dangerous if you have diabetes, and parents worry terribly about that during that period. Another time that parents particularly experience a lot of stress and anxiety is when the child eventually finishing high school and moving on to college. Up to that point the teenager may have been managing the diabetes largely independently; however there is still a sense that there is a safety net. Once they go off to college, who knows what they are going get up to. If something goes wrong, who is going to recognize it? Who is going to be there for the child?

-Joseph Wolfsdorf, MD, BCh, Associate Chief, Division of Endocrinology

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Diabetes and alcohol experimentation

Being a teenager with diabetes is doubly challenging because there are some things that your family, school nurse or your doctors really need to be told about, that teenagers often keep to themselves.  For example, experimentation with alcohol.  Experimenting with alcohol is quite dangerous for a teenager with diabetes.  It’s important for the medical team to educate teenagers about risk taking behaviors so that they know how to take care of their diabetes in a variety of different situations.   The risk factors with alcohol are many – you go “low” when you drink alcohol and many teenagers are not aware of this fact.  Also, the more alcohol you drink, your inhibitions relax and the less the less responsible or cognitively aware you become. So maybe you do need a shot or you need to check your blood sugar, but you think that you don’t. 

-Jennifer Rein, LICSW, Licensed Social Worker, Diabetes Program

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