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Keep Your Teens' Health in Check
Managing Chronic Illnesses
in Adolescents
in Adolescents
By Kelly Burgess
Joyce Stack of Fairless Hills, Penn., was anxious about her two children as they approached their teen years. Not just about driving, sex, drugs or any of the other well-publicized issues of teens. Instead, she worried that they might stop for pizza on the spur of the moment and forget to take their insulin.
"When any kid hits their teen years life becomes a whole different ball game," says Stack. "You don't have the control any longer, and you can't just stand there making sure they're taking their insulin. It ratchets up the stakes because it's not like you're just trusting them with the car keys."
Every phase of parenthood has its own stresses, but the teenage years are new territory for both children and parents. Add a chronic illness to the mix, and it ups the worry level quite a bit.
Although Dr. Elizabeth McQuaid doesn't like the term "immortal" when used with teens, because she thinks they know better than that, she does say that adolescence is a period where teens are testing limits and don't have an enhanced sense of their own mortality.
Dr. McQuaid is an assistant professor in the department of psychiatry at Brown Medical School. The subject of her research is family approaches to chronic illness management. One of her recent studies, which tracked inhaler use in 58 children ages 10 to 16 with asthma, found that children took only about 40 percent of the medicine prescribed for their condition.
"Around the teen years, kids start spending more time away from home as they get more involved in outside activities," says Dr. McQuaid. "Someone who needs to be monitoring blood sugar throughout the day suddenly has school all day, then soccer practice and then goes to a friend's house and may just forget all about monitoring. Although this is the age that most children become more responsible for their own medicine, it has also been established that this is the time when they are least likely to follow strategies of preventive management."