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| Categories: Diabetes in everyday life |
| Diabetes in everyday life | |
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Diabetes and school
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Enrolment at primary school
Your child is diabetic? Soon it should be enrolled to school? Nowadays, parents are free to choose the primary school where they want their children to start the school career. But their choice is often influenced by the thought of their daughter’s or son’s chronic disease. This is natural, and yet the diabetes should not determine to which school the child is sent to but parents should decide for a school that corresponds to their child’s interests and preferences.
There are some principles parents should take in consideration while choosing a primary school:
- Your child already knows some other boys or girls from the kindergarten or the preschool.
- The primary school is not far from your house or your workplace so that, in case of an emergency, you can react very quickly.
- The choice of the school does not necessarily separate the child from its old friends from the kindergarten (it is possible to find a common playground.)
Before making their choice, it can be useful for the parents to talk to the principal or some teachers of the school. While doing this, parents should pay attention to the following aspects:
- The teachers have already some experience with the chronic disease diabetes mellitus.
- The teachers are cooperative and willing to consult you for educational questions concerning the child’s disease.
- The teachers are open-minded about your son’s/daughter’s diabetes.
Before your child enters the classroom for the first time, it is useful:
- to give informative material about diabetes to the teachers. To be on the safe side, it is advisable to supply the teachers with informative material several times!
- to offer the teachers to talk to the diabetologist. A possible conversation between the doctor and the teachers should be arranged with the diabetologist in advance.
- to make it clear to the teachers that they accept the responsibility for your child in case of an emergency but that the regulation of the diabetes remains in your hands. This way you can take away the inexperienced teachers’ fear of the new situation.
In practice, some further pieces of advice have proved their worth:
Inform the teachers that if the child does not feel well, it must not go home alone and has to be accompanied by an adult. Apart from that, tell them that even in case of low blood sugar level, the child must not be forced to eat dextrose if it does not want to, because otherwise the child could choke. To avoid these situations, it is recommendable to supply the teachers with liquid carbohydrates (e.g. Carrero) for the child or to get a glucagon set from the doctor. It is useful to keep one of these sets in a safe place at home and to make another one available to the school. Do not forget to show the teachers how to handle it. It is also important that a close confidant who knows how to operate the blood sugar measuring instrument is always with the child. If snacks between the meals are needed for the therapy, try to arrange that they coincide with school breaks. Foster the contact with other parents and children in order to teach them how to handle diabetes. If the teacher presses you to send your child to a special school because of the diabetes, do not content yourself with this solution because it is not a sound reasoning. If there are some reasons connected with your child’s disease why you are not fine with a certain school, you should consider changing the school, but not the type of school! At last, we want to propose you to ask the principal if there are other diabetic children at school, no matter at which age they are. The cooperation with these children and with their parents can be extremely profitable.
Translated by Stefanie Wagner ( Stefanie Wagner ) |
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