Shares How to Teach Kids Responsibility: The Five Essential E’s! Part 3 of 5: EMPATHY

    

     This blog is the third in a five-part series about raising responsible children. Last week we went over the importance of Experience and how it plays a role in these five steps. We hope you are able to follow along each week and put each of these steps into practice in your day-to-day life. 

Shares How to Teach Kids Responsibility: The Five Essential E’s! Part 2 of 5: EXPERIENCE

This blog is the second in a five-part series about raising responsible children. As a reminder, Love and Logic® teaches us to use five easily understood, practical, and effective skill sets - The Five Essential E's: Example, Experience, Empathy, Expectations, and Encouragement.  Last week we went over the importance of Example and how it plays a role in these five steps. We hope you are able to follow along each week and put each of these steps into play as we move on. 

Shares How to Teach Kids Responsibility: The Five Essential E’s! Part 1 of 5: Example

This week we proudly announced the release of our long-awaited DVD. After pouring everything we have into this disc, we are now able to celebrate our grand release and share this with all of you. In revel of this exciting event, we are hosting this free blog series on the Five Essential E's to Raising Responsible Children. This blog series is filled with information normally taught in our classes and seminars, as well as in our DVD. We hope you will find some light in this information and can apply these techniques with your children at home. Please follow our blog by subscribing to the RSS feed or by email (in the right column) to get updated on future series posts!

Cystic Fibrosis Food Struggles: How do you get your children to eat enough?

A mother recently contacted us about getting her 19 month old daughter with cystic fibrosis to raise her calorie intake.

Photo by PhotoStock

Question: Are your CFer's picky eaters? My daughter who is almost 19 months has cystic fibrosis but the only problem she has is that she doesn’t eat well. So, we have to give her Pediasure to make sure she is getting enough calories. I wish that she would eat better but she doesn’t so the Pediasure is necessary for the time being. And I am tired of being viewed as the lazy parent who doesn’t want to make her child eat. If this is something you have experienced, how have you handled it? – NE

Once a Parent, Always a Parent: When Adult Children with Chronic Illness Make Bad Life Choices

A mom writes in to us and shares her story about her adult daughter who has diabetes.

Question: My husband and I are struggling with our now 22 year old daughter who has had type 1 diabetes since age six. Your book was recommended to me. I wish we'd had this information years ago. I can now see where we played right into the hostile dependent lifestyle by trying so hard to make her feel normal. I feel like a failure. I recognize that she is falling prey to "victimization," seems to think we are her biggest enemies who are only seeking to cause her unhappiness, and is overly dependent on relationships with the wrong type of young men. She is so "confused," she can't seem to separate good intentions from bad. Please direct me how to help her or what to do. Thank you so much. Your book opened my eyes to the problem, and I'm praying it's not too late. - CT

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Survival Skills for Taking Young Children to the Medical Clinic

Photo by PhotoStock

It was about 12:30pm. I had been at the hospital in the specialty clinic now for nearly three hours with two young children, parked in a small room with an exam table and one chair. The kids were bouncing off the walls and I was ready to go out of my mind.

Did the doctor REALLY think I could absorb what she was saying to me? I could not understand half the words she was using. This "CF-thing" was still all so new to me. Yet, my two babies' lives depended on me. Sigh. I'd better get my act together. As my son melted down and my daughter started hanging on me, I really did not feel like parent of the year.

Key Tips for Staying on Track with Medications

These tips were circulating on a couple of cystic fibrosis (CF) message boards and I thought they were  excellent so wanted to share them with you.

These tips are good for not only us parents, but also important things to teach our kids, too. I am sharing them with my 11 and 13 year olds who both have CF. We are working on getting them ready to manage their own clinic visits. My 13 year old will probably be talking alone with the doctors in about a year. This is part of the "transition process" which is preparing our kids for the real world including that of managing their illness on their own. We'll be writing more about this in the weeks to come.

For kids, I especially like the tip about taping a pill to the medication list so that it can be easily identified. I noticed that, during clinic, my kids sometimes struggle a little with the different names of the drugs (especially when there are brand names plus generic names) but can readily identify what they look like. This will help them learn what the different meds are. They both take about 15 different meds each day including supplements so this is no small thing! We are also working on memorizing the dosages.

Dr. Lorraine J. Gudas and Dr. Mark S. Lachs offered these key tips on how to stay on track with your medications and steer clear of unsafe drug interactions at New York-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center's 29th Annual Women's Health Symposium:

• Keep a list of your medications with you at all times.
• Make sure to include brand AND generic names as well as dosages and frequency. Include all vitamins and supplements on the list.
• Share the list with every health care provider you come in contact with, whether or not he or she suggests new medicines or medicine changes.
• Never mix medications in the same bottle even if traveling; taping an actual pill to your medication list can help you identify which medicine is which.
• When you hear about a new drug or a health tip, ask yourself: Is this based on a clinical trial, an observational study, or only personal endorsements?
• Don't make health decisions on the basis of observational studies. They are interesting to think about, but they don't prove anything.
• If you are thinking of buying a supplement or drug, ask your doctor's opinion. Don't take them on the basis of personal testimony.

Dr. Lorraine J. Gudas is chairman and Revlon Pharmaceutical Professor of Pharmacology and Toxicology of the Department of Pharmacology at Weill Cornell Medical College, and Dr. Mark S. Lachs is director of geriatrics at NewYork-Presbyterian Healthcare System and author of "Treat Me, Not My Age."

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Lisa C. Greene is the mother of two children with cystic fibrosis, a certified parent coach, parenting educator, and public speaker. She is also the co-author with Foster Cline, MD of the award-winning Love and Logic® book “Parenting Children with Health Issues.”   For more information, visit www.ParentingChildrenWithHealthIssues.com