Coping with your child’s illness, especially if it is a chronic one, can have a major impact on the whole family’s quality of life. Your child’s outcome, pain tolerance, and ability to live a semi-normal life all depend on the supportive condition of their home life. Here are a few tips to handling the stresses of an illness and how to make life livable again.
1. Adapt
Be willing to make necessary lifestyle and home changes. Make it easier to care for your child by creating an environment that is as operative as possible. Let go of unnecessary obligations in your personal and community life. Encourage self-management, independence, and decision making in your child. Help your child find things s/he enjoys and encourage him/her to try new things and activities.
2. Share the responsibilities
It is a tremendous help if you can share these immense responsibilities with your spouse, a family member, or even an occasional hired babysitter or caregiver. You cannot possibly take on the stress of caretaking all by yourself. You need to take breaks, especially for the sake of your own health.
3. Get professional help
Pediatricians, specialists, therapists, community agencies, social workers, support groups, local children’s hospitals, national organizations, teachers, and others can form a health care team. That will enable you to have support from others with similar experiences and know you are not alone.
The Starlight Children’s Foundation, for example, is a nonprofit that partners with experts in healthcare, technology, and entertainment to create family-centered services to help with every-day challenges. Check to see if there is a Registered Health Information Technician (RHIT) with a health information management available to assist you with your medical needs and concerns.
4. Education
Seek information from doctors, the internet, books, magazine articles, and specialists in order to understand the child’s illness, treatment, and needed care. Attend community support meetings to learn how other parents manage the more difficult situations. Take the extra steps to have your child diagnosed correctly. Otherwise, a misdiagnosis can lead to more problems further down the road.
5. Maintain your own physical health
If you don’t look after yourself, you won’t be able to take care of your child. It is important that you somehow manage to eat healthy and get sufficient sleep and regular exercise. Taking time to relax and participate in a hobby or beloved activity is extremely beneficial and cuts down on damaging stress. Therefore, make sure to fit those things into your calendar and take part in them regularly.
Chronic illness is life changing for everyone, and hopefully the above suggestions will help you, as Supermom, cope with the different responsibilities you have taken upon yourself. Be as creative as you possibly can in order to stay out of a boring rut and make life more interesting and exciting for you and your child.
