Is my child ready for university? It’s a question I see asked a lot. There’s a 10,000 strong Facebook group dedicated to discussing the issues parents have when their children are preparing to leave home for university, and the questions come in cycles. Right now, it’s UCAS forms and university choices, as the deadline for applications looms. In a couple of months it will be questions about A-Level revision and exam dates, and then will come the angst – in rafts – over teenagers whose parents don’t think they’re ready. (I have a sneaking suspicion it’s the parents who aren’t ready most of the time, not the kids.)
But what happens when your child has additional needs? Whether it’s a dangerous medical condition like Type 1 Diabetes, a severe allergy, or an educational or social need, parents have more reason to worry when their young people have needed extra support to get to this point. In a recent episode of the Teenage Kicks Podcast, I spoke to Professor Deborah Christie – a psychologist who supports families of children and teenagers with Type 1 Diabetes. As a parent herself, Deborah talks about how any disability makes it more difficult to leave home, especially for the often chaotic lifestyle of university.
With data* suggesting that over a third of young adults have a long-term physical or mental health condition, disability or illness, Deborah offers reassurance and tips for success, whatever your fears for your child as they gain independence and have to look after themselves.
* Research commissioned to mark the integration of Abbott’s FreeStyle Libre 2 Plus sensor with Insulet’s Omnipod® 5 Automated Insulin Delivery System.
You can read the full transcript of this episode of the Teenage Kicks Podcast, watch the video, or listen to the audio version of the podcast below.
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Is your teen ready for university?
With 61 percent of British parents believing that their teenagers aren’t ready to go it alone, it’s interesting to see how many of them are right. The survey fund that:
- One in four (26 percent) British teens aged between 15 and 18 can’t boil an egg
- 43 percent would struggle to put a wash on
- 48 percent of teens don’t know how to pay a bill or use an iron
- 54 percent have no idea how to set up a direct debit or get a TV Licence
- Four in ten would struggle to plan out their weekly meals
- 27 percent are unable to tell when they need to see a doctor or even when they are unwell
Other tasks that leave the nation’s teens scratching their heads include booking a doctor’s appointment, opening a bank account, taking out the bins on the right days, reading the train timetable and EVEN changing the bed sheets (although I suspect that’s just laziness!)
How can you help get your child ready for independence at university?
I remember being distraught when my daughter was diagnosed with Type 1 Diabetes at the age of 9. Even then, I knew it was big enough to cause problems when it came to her having independence from me. And although she was much more self-sufficient by the time she reached the age of 18, she was still vulnerable, especially given the often chaotic lifestyle of a first year university student.
It hasn’t been plain sailing, but she has learned with my support from a distance – more than just the subject she went to study! And as she goes into her third year, I’m more confident than I was. Plenty of other families navigate this transition too, so try to remember that it will probably be ok. Stressful, but ok. Here are some ideas to help prepare your teen – and you – for the move to university living.
Tips to prepare for university
Use your experience
Take yourself back to how you felt leaving home for the biggest adventure of your life – what did your parents do that helped? Make a note of those. What did they do that didn’t help? Make a note of those too. However ready you felt you were to leave home, your parents probably felt just like you are feeling now. But look at how far you have come and congratulate yourself. You’ve done an amazing job to get your kids to this point in their life.
You know how to do this!
Ask yourself what you have already achieved as a parent. Since they were born you have helped them go from a baby that needed you all the time to an emerging adult ready to step out into the world. How did you help them with each of these transitions through the developmental stages of childhood to adolescence? How did you help them transition into nursery? How did you help them go to secondary school? Trust yourself – you know how to do this!
It’s never too early to start practising for the big move
Create a toolkit of survival skills for living independently. Make a list of all the things that they might need to know how to do:
- Can they shop for and cook simple basic meals? Get them to help you with the weekly shop and prepare some basics – so they don’t have to live on dried noodles!
- Get them to help with family meals and see if they can do that. If not, how will you help them learn?
- Do they know how to use a washing machine and where the detergent goes? If not, it’s up to them if they want to live in smelly clothes. They’ll soon learn, and you won’t be there to know about it anyway.
- Have they got a basic grasp of managing their finances? Do they know how to budget? Have they had a chance to practice keep spending on track? What’s the plan for when they run out of money?
Ensure you have a risk reduction strategy – the adolescent brain is designed to look for and explore new experiences so you can never avoid all risk but you can ensure that as part of the toolkit you have a ‘what if’ resource of useful numbers, affirmations – or just statements like ‘call mum if I’m miserable’, which you can keep on their phone or computer. Have a chat about what they will do if they feel homesick, stressed, or anxious, feel like they want to quit, lose focus or motivation or have their heart broken. Normalising potential blips in emotional wellbeing is important and can happen to everyone. They might not want to talk to you but make sure they know it’s important to talk to someone – it’s OK not to feel OK but it’s not OK to do nothing about it.
Remember that an additional need is just one piece of the jigsaw
Parental worries highlighted in FreeStyle Libre’s research are heightened if you are one of the 3 in 10 families that love and parent an adolescent living with a chronic condition like Type 1 diabetes. But all parents agree technology can provide peace of mind. Remember that adolescents with chronic conditions may face more difficulties than their peers, but they also have more commonalities than differences. Their condition is just one part of the amazing jigsaw that their life is and will be. And technologies like health monitors and alarms for diabetes are there to help.
Teens with a chronic condition need the same guidance and support as any other adolescent. Deborah says “Try and focus on the days at school, sleepovers and activity holidays that they already survived and think what it was that helped them (and you) survive it – it might not have been perfect but nothing ever is.”
Who is Deborah Christie?
Deborah Christie is a professor of paediatric and adolescent psychology at University College London NHS Foundation Trust and Dartford and Gravesham NHS Trust. She is an internationally respected academic and award-winning clinician; with an outstanding record of peer-reviewed publications, teaching and leadership with over 200 peer reviewed papers and chapters and a bestselling book, Psychosocial Aspects of Diabetes in Children, Adolescents and Families. She co-authored the expert reports on Psychosocial Issues of infection and the Impact of bereavement for the UK government Infected Blood Inquiry.
FULL TRANSCRIPT
This is going to be an interesting conversation if you have children with diabetes, if you have diabetes, or if you have any kind of medical condition that leaves you feeling a little bit fearful about when your child leaves home. You’re going to want to listen to this conversation if that sounds like you. Deborah, welcome to the podcast.
Deborah Christie Oh, thank you so much. It’s so nice to be here. It’s a real pleasure.
Helen Wills I have to apologise to anyone and to you who’s watching first of all because I moved house about four weeks ago and I still have not got my Wi-Fi set, well I have but… in the room that I want to work in, it’s not good. I’ve had a disaster already this morning. So people have to put up with me sitting on my sofa with a microphone right in my face, and I’m leaning forwards and backwards to reach my computer. So Deborah was just saying, just to try and remember to behave yourself professionally and look in the right directions. I’m like, no, we don’t do that here. We just, what you see is what you get. Take us as you find us. How are you doing, Deborah?
Deborah Christie You know, I’m I’ve got a mixed portfolio career now. I still work at UCLH, but not with the child service. I decided that they were already brilliant enough without me and I could move on. But I still work a bit with UCLH, with the women’s health. I work at Dartford and Gresham NHS Trust as a consultant, helping them develop their paediatric psychology service as well, which is great fun. Just edit a journal, I’ll do a bit of this and a bit of that, but still still see young people with diabetes, young people and their families because no young person lives with it on their own, Helen, as you know, and then do a bit of work with Abbott as well.
Helen Wills Yes. No, that’s true. Yeah. Amazing. I mean, just to elaborate on how I know Deborah, Deborah saw me for several sessions of counselling and it probably was still the first year of Maddie’s diagnosis with type 1 diabetes when she was only 10. I’m a qualified counsellor now but I still am aware of the tears wanting to come whenever I start talking about that time but you helped me massively and we will talk about your grandson’s diagnosis later in the podcast but yeah I’d be fascinated to know how it feels for you from an emotional perspective having been on the other side of it as the professionals supporting the people who are sitting there blubbering wrecks in your office. Deborah before we go into that, we always start traditionally with a little bit of detail on my guests’ own teenage years. So tell us what was it like for you growing up, particularly as you got to teenage years?
Deborah Christie I had a wonderful mum and dad who are no longer with us, well, no longer physically with us, but still very much mentally, spiritually, emotionally supporting me in the background. And I was a very good girl to begin with. I’m wondering if my sister’s listening. Yeah, I’m wondering if my sister’s listening to this because she’ll be shouting at the computer, “No, you weren’t.” Lovely sister, really lovely sister, younger sister, best of friends still after 60 odd years. And when I became a teenager, I did what every teenager does. My brain was developing in a particular way. And whilst I was quite an overachiever, I worked very hard at school, but I was also very sociable and I loved enjoying myself and going to parties. And as I got older, I started to do all the sorts of things that I have written about over the years. I’ve done them all, all that stuff. My dad picking me up after I’d had just a little bit too much of something I shouldn’t have drunk. And some mornings waking up saying, “I’m never going to drink again.” That didn’t happen either. So yeah, I wasn’t perfect, wasn’t perfect at all. I thought my parents didn’t understand me, and then I became a parent and really I still didn’t because of course we don’t even though we’ve been through it, even though we’ve been adolescents. So yes, I did all the sorts of stuff like trying to sneak out the house and going out with inappropriate boys and drinking too much at parties and my skirts were too short and yeah, you literally read my chapter on adolescent development and I’ve done everything. Did it all.
Helen Wills Of course. Oh, right. This is a book you’ve written.
Deborah Christie Well, I’ve written a lot over the years, and also written about the development of the adolescent brain and how the brain underpins a lot of the things. You know, you think about an adolescent having a job description, that their primary requirement of an adolescent is to annoy the hell out of their parents and to do that by not letting them know where they are and wanting to be completely independent, but at the same time demanding lifts home and wanting to be like their friends and everything that an adolescent does over a period of time from 12 probably now all the way up to their late 20s is underpinned by the way that the brain develops and so I’ve written a bit about that.
Helen Wills Oh, amazing. I’ll get you to just name check that book before we end and I’ll put the link in the show notes. But you’ve just reminded me of a brilliant title to a book which I read, which is exactly what you were just describing. It’s called, I think it’s called ‘Mum Get Out of My Life But First Take Me and Kevin Into Town’.
Deborah Christie Perfect. That’s it. That sums it up. Yes, that sums it up.
Helen Wills It does, doesn’t it?
Deborah Christie Yeah, that’s absolutely right. I’m not telling you where I’m going, but could you pick me up at two o’clock in the morning?
Helen Wills Yeah, yeah.
Deborah Christie You’ll need to tell me where you are in order for that to happen.
Helen Wills Yeah, yeah, no, it’s you speaking to every parent of teenagers, which is pretty much most of the people listening to this. I’m just sorry, I’ve just got distracted by my dog yelling at the front door because somebody’s knocked on the door, but I’m going to ignore that. And now there’s someone right. So this is the joy of having just moved house and sitting in a room you don’t normally sit in to do your recordings.
Deborah Christie Yep. Well, thank goodness for the edit button.
Helen Wills No, I’m not even going to bother. We started this podcast during lockdown and all sorts was going on in the house. So there was some drilling in the wall right next to me at one point. And I just went, you know what? I give up. Let’s just bring it into the equation and talk about it. So that’s the way we do it here.
Deborah Christie Well, that’s what life is though, isn’t it? I mean, that’s the other thing. It’s that actually you can’t edit out your life unless you believe all the rubbish on Instagram and social media. Actually, life is really messy. Life is messy and things happen that you didn’t expect. And of course, being diagnosed with diabetes is one of those things, you know?
Helen Wills Yeah, and it’s a pretty big one. I remember for me, it derailed my entire life for two full years. And yet I tried to pretend at the time that it hadn’t derailed my life and crack on as normal. And I do remember, and I still live to this day with this in mind, saying to my daughter and my family, “This will not change how any of how we live our life,” and of course it has but it “will not stop you from doing anything you want to do.” And we’ve made sure of that and she now is thriving and at the age of 20 and has that same attitude and I said that because she was a throw-herself-at-life kind of person even from a very young age and I was determined that it wouldn’t change that about her. And I really believe that’s a good thing to have done. However, it nearly broke me. It would have been so much easier to crawl into a corner and go, “Let’s just stay at home and keep it simple.” I’m assuming you have met both kinds of families in your work. The people who do get ultra cautious, I mean, I did get ultra cautious, I still made everything happen that could possibly happen.
Deborah Christie Yeah. You know, I mean, again, there’s even though we talk about generalisations about adolescents. If you’ve met one adolescent, you’ve met one adolescent. And if you’ve met one parent of a child with diabetes, that’s one parent. And I think that’s often the mistake that people make when they’re trying to support families is that they say, “Well, this is what you have to do.” That’s rubbish, because actually what you have to do is what works for you as a family. So yeah, absolutely. There are some parents who for them, what works best is being incredibly cautious and following the rules, almost 100%. And then there are families that go, “I don’t even believe this exists.” It’s almost like there’s this sort of sense of “I’m just gonna just carry on whatever” and just carry on doing it. And then of course, and both of those are extremes on the end of a spectrum. And nothing’s right, but nothing’s wrong. Everybody’s trying to survive when a nuclear bomb has gone off in the middle of their family.
Helen Wills Yeah, yeah. And that is what it feels like. It is for anyone listening who doesn’t get it, who doesn’t understand type one diabetes, it feels catastrophic when it happens. And that is something that’s quite difficult to cope with on the basis that the rest of the world who doesn’t get it really thinks that diabetes is no big deal. And what I’ve realised over the years is that it’s not just type 1 diabetes, it’s any diagnosis that really has a big impact on your life that other people don’t understand. And it’s made me really rethink my approach to other families who have different things like autism, who have serious nut allergies, for example, all sorts of things that affect their child, affects their family. I’ve just been talking to another guest, John Wilson Cooper, whose brother was born deaf, and growing up in that family was really difficult for him too, and for the entire family. And so I just do not judge anyone else’s experience or how they choose to manage it. And I think in diabetes, that’s one of the classics because we’re told so many times by the media “you brought it on yourself.” “It’s too much sugar.” “You shouldn’t eat that.” “You should do this.” “You’re a bad diabetic.” And it just all adds to the stigma and the pain of the family, right?
Deborah Christie Yeah yeah no absolutely and I think chronic illness derails adolescent development so if you as I said if you think about it as a kind of a job description an adolescent is trying to get through this period of time, their brains are slowly developing. I mean, it’s like an adolescent brain is a bit like this. You know, this is all the inside, this is all the spinal cord, and this is all the inside, where all the emotion is happening, and all the social requirements, and that’s all going on. And here, this is the bit that quietens it all down. This is the calm, sensible part of the brain. Well, an adolescent brain is like this.
Helen Wills I’m going to interrupt you just for a second, Deborah. For those of those people who are listening and can’t see the video, Deborah is holding her hand up and the bit where there will be emotion is the thumb stuck in the palm of the hand. And then the fingers are the bit that cover it and make it make sense. And she’s waving those fingers around when she describes the teenager.
Deborah Christie Like a flip, well it’s flip, we call it flipping the lid, that’s the kind of like the emotion and it’s the emotional regulation, it’s the ability to calm, you know, if you think of the difference between your hand with your fingers waggling and your fingers in a sort of like a prayer-like position, the prayer-like position is when we get to 29, our brain is fully developed and fully formed but up until that point, you know, the young people are taking risks. Now, one of the things I always remember was a mum I met who said, you know, the diabetes team want me to make sure that they have their insulin before they have their breakfast. Quite right. Quite sensible. That’s what the physiology tells us. And so the insulin is taken and then the kid goes, “Don’t want any breakfast.” And yeah, “Okay, fine. Now what do I do?” And so not surprisingly, a lot of young people with diabetes go, “I’m not taking my insulin pre-prandially before the food. I’m not doing that because I don’t know how much I’ll eat and then I’ll have had too much. And then I’ll go then I’ll go low. And then everybody will nag me because I’ve gone.” You’ve got this constant kind of balancing normal because you sometimes you want breakfast, sometimes you don’t want breakfast.
Helen Wills Yeah, well, like a normal person, right? And a normal person doesn’t have to plan 20 minutes ahead exactly how much food they’re going to eat to match it with the medication they have to take to allow them to eat it.
Deborah Christie Exactly. So it is deeply annoying that the whole kind of presentation of diabetes, the confusion between type one and type two, isn’t recognised, that people don’t understand the impact of a diagnosis of something that is going to be with you for the rest of your life that you can cope with. And you as you know, Helen, the message that I’ve always try to convey to people is it’s just one tiny part of your life. It’s not everything, but it will do its best to get in there and sneak about the house and trip you up and get in between you and cause arguments. And then it’ll rush off going, “Ha ha ha, I was successful mucking things up and everybody’s furious with each other” and diabetes is sitting in the corner chuckling, you know?
Helen Wills Yeah, I always liken diabetes to a toddler throwing tantrums because whatever you do, it will do something you don’t expect. And there are calm days when the toddler behaves itself really well and everyone gets on fine. And then there are a lot of other days, a lot, where it just does something really random like run out into the road and you’ve just got to cope and react in the moment.
Deborah Christie Yeah. And that’s what you do have to do. You have to learn and to, I mean, what it does is it destroys spontaneity. I mean, that’s the thing that, you know, every young person I’ve ever worked with, you know, has looked at me right in the eyes and said, “It’s destroyed the ability to be spontaneous in my life.”
Helen Wills Well, absolutely.
Deborah Christie And then what they do is they go, “Huh, well, I’m just going to be spontaneous” and go with it and of course they do that and then but that’s okay too as long as you understand how to manage the consequences of and the fallout.
Helen Wills The fallout. Yeah, exactly. And I would say you were describing someone that really controls it to the nth degree, that was me for a few years. And whilst it was in my control rather than Maddie’s, I really, really nailed it for her as best I could. I felt terrible about every slip up. And that’s, that’s why I’m now a counsellor. I had to I had to seek my own therapy because trying to control the uncontrollable is just not possible and I had to learn that, but inevitably when the young person gets freedom, independence, wants to be like everyone else, and wants a life for God’s sake, it’s not, it isn’t too much to ask, they just, it’s, my daughter’s at university now, I don’t talk too much about her on the podcast because it’s her story to tell now rather than mine, but of course, she’s being very spontaneous. She’s having a lot of late nights. Her life is not routine. She is drinking alcohol. She wants to do what her friends are doing. It’s just normal life. And so inevitably, her blood sugar is more haywire than it was when she was completely there and my full-time job. I had to stop work for a couple of years because she was she was my full-time job. But we’re very quick to judge people who don’t toe the line exactly and call them bad diabetics. Actually, they’re just people living their lives and having to drag along this toddler, toddler illness with them and keep themselves alive and doing a fantastic job of keeping herself alive and university doesn’t last forever. So that, let on that note let’s let’s get on to talking about going through, well yeah actually maybe you can tell me first of all, I want to talk about going off to university, what it’s like for them, what it’s like for us parents and the tips, but we’ll do that in a second. I’d like to ask you how it was for you when your grandson was diagnosed. How old was he?
Deborah Christie Yeah. Okay, so it’s my turn to get emotional now. So it was 18 months ago. He was 12. And it was, you know, the irony of it all, really, because I’ve been working with young people and families for 25, over 25 years now, developing interventions to try and support parents and interventions for kids and working one to one with people who have been really devastated and can’t manage and can’t function and he was quite poorly and my My husband, his granddad and I were both quite concerned. His mum and dad were quite concerned about him. And we kept saying, “There’s something not wrong.” And I kept saying things like, “Oh, it might be long COVID,” or “It might be chronic fatigue,” or “Maybe he’s got an eating disorder.” Do you know, I completely missed it. Completely missed it. Never occurred to me he had all the, he had all the thirst, tiredness, he had the weight loss, he was constantly drinking, he’d been with us the weekend before and drunk two litres of apple juice in about an hour and he was losing weight. He was so skinny, oh my God, I’ve got pictures of him it just breaks my heart. Yeah, just awful. Anyway, went into hospital and my son phoned me and said, “He’s got a blood glucose of a million,” wherever it was. And and I said, well, I did swear and said, “He’s got diabetes.” I know he’s got diabetes and they and and my oldest son said “Oh you’ll have to wait, you’re not a doctor mother, you’re not a doctor mother, you have to wait.” And I said, “No I’m not a doctor but I believe me, I know about this.” And my my darling daughter-in-law and my lovely lovely son, I’ve got two boys and yeah, they were they were brilliant and I did smile because I remember my daughter-in-law was saying to me, “Well, you know, he’s going to be great because he’s such a good boy and he’s, you know, he’s so clever. He’ll be able to manage all of this perfectly.” And I had to bite my tongue because I thought, well, he won’t. It’s going to be so difficult. My husband was devastated, absolutely distraught and has become an expert on diabetes now. He has read every single thing you can read on it. My reaction, I was, I was, yeah, distraught sums it up. I didn’t cry in front of anybody in the family because it was like, “Okay, we’ve got this.” I know enough people to make sure that we get the good help and we make sure that we, you know, and I’ve, I know stuff, I know stuff. And I kind of summed it up from, I went from knowing to feeling. I went from knowing it in my head to feeling it in my heart. You know, I feel everything that I knew. And we had a small disagreement yesterday. As a two example, he’s now 14. He’s a very bright kid, very bright boy, but he knows everything. And he knows everything because he’s 14 yes, and he was high and then he was low and then he was high and then he was low and he was doing an English mock and when he came home from school, I happened to be there and I heard his mum say to him, “I’ve been looking at your sugars all day and you were down at two,” which is very, very low for people that don’t know. “And and where and I couldn’t get through to you.” And he said, “You know, stop going on at me.” He was really cross with his mother. And when I said to him, “Did the teachers not give you some extra time to manage your highs and your lows?” And he said, “I didn’t need extra time. I was fine. I was perfectly all right.” And I said, “If you’re writing an essay and your blood sugars are 18, you’re not perfectly all right.” And he said, “I know what I’m capable of. I don’t need any extra help. I don’t.” And he stormed up the stairs and we were all left standing looking at each other. And my daughter, God bless her, rolled her eyes. She’s I mean, she is wonderful. And she tries to run the gamut of perfect control, let him what he needs to do. She runs back and forwards between those two extremes, constantly worried. And I’ve had nights where we’ve been on the phone to each other, WhatsApp-ing, because she’s been so concerned about him. My husband has him on the app so that he can, yep, that flipping app. Can I just say, I’ve turned my notifications off. I don’t want to know. I can’t I can’t bear it.
Helen Wills No, there’s nothing you can do about it.
Deborah Christie No, I can’t bear it. If I am like like I was at a conference you know last month and I’m in a foreign country, what am I going to do if he’s high? I know that A, he is quite sensible most of the time, some of the time. I’m not quite sure.
Helen Wills He knows how to keep himself alive.
Deborah Christie He does, he does, but I know that his mum is WhatsApp-ing him and I know that his dad is WhatsApp-ing him and and his granddad is doing it too, driving him insane. And we’re going to get on to technology, aren’t we?
Helen Wills Well, yes. So that’s, I was just thinking for those people listening who don’t have diabetes in the family, what Deborah is describing is a continuous glucose monitor or a sensor which reads the levels of blood glucose to simplify things and can send those levels to a carer or a parent’s phone, anybody’s phone, so that we can see that remotely. I can see my daughter’s blood sugar on my phone every five minutes. And it gives peace of mind. For me, largely it helped me sleep. It meant that I could go to sleep knowing that if she was in trouble with either a high or a low blood sugar, I would get an alarm and I’d be told about it rather than me waking up every hour or so thinking, “Is she okay?” and having to go and prick a finger in the night to check. So that’s the tech that Deborah’s talking about. And Abbott’s Freestyle Libre is one of those monitors and you’ll see people wearing it. It looks a bit like the dreaded monitor that people have on their arms. It looks kind of exactly the same. That’s not for diabetes purposes, but Abbott’s Libre was created for monitoring blood sugar blood glucose levels for diabetics. Is that a fair summary?
Deborah Christie Yeah, it’s a good summary. And it’s and it’s amazing that the continuous glucose monitors now that exist allow you you don’t have to you know, in the old days when I first started and when you probably first started, you know, kids had to prick their fingers with a little sharp lancet and if they were being very, very good, to use that awful expression, they would have to do it every two hours. You would have to keep checking your blood sugars and you would have to say, kids had band-aids on their fingers or their fingers would go numb. It was absolutely awful and so the development of a little thing that you wear on your arm. If people are Strictly Come Dancing fans, they’ll see it on Nikita. He’s got a little white circle on his arm and that’s basically telling his phone what his blood glucose is and whether he’s safe to keep dancing. And yeah, so that is amazing. I think that is just incredible. And things like pumps as well that have been developed to allow the delivery of safe amounts of insulin.
They’re so clever now. I mean, and again, when I think back to the very first pump that I learned about 20 odd years ago, it was mind blowing then. But now what they can do is even more incredible. So they can actually stop insulin. If you’re going very low, they can measure that. They know because of the little glucose meter. And so they can stop delivering it. If you’re going low, they can give you a little bit more if you’re going high. And so they can try to help manage. So whilst parents make perfect pancreases, practically perfect pancreases, the new technology kind of offers an enormous amount of hope and a reduction in the constantly being in your mind that it’s still in your mind.
Helen Wills The emotional burden.
Deborah Christie Yeah, it is. It’s a fantastically emotional burden. I mean, we worry about our kids anyway. Yes I got two boys. They were both They were both excellent adolescents. They also followed. It’s like they’d read my book. They knew exactly what to do, but I didn’t have to I didn’t have with them the worry of a chronic illness. I was very, very lucky. They just did stupid things like play rugby and break their noses and their collarbones. So that was all I had to worry about.
Helen Wills There’s always something, isn’t there?
Deborah Christie Oh, always, yeah. And both of them, you know, had one of them, one of them went off to Italy to go to university. I mean, it was like, “Could you not go any further?” Could you, because that’s great.
Helen Wills Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I’ve got one that’s interested in Australia.
Deborah Christie Oh, excellent. Yeah. I always always remember getting the phone call to say, “I’ve locked myself in my apartment in Milan.”
Helen Wills Excellent.
Deborah Christie Yeah. And it was like, oh…
Helen Wills Is that not the point at which you go, “What do you want me to do about it? See ya.”
Deborah Christie Well, of course, you know, you know what I did. I immediately got onto a locksmith in Italian, told the locksmith where he was, had the in Milan, had the locksmith go out and rescue him.
Helen Wills No. Oh, why do we always jump in and rescue our kids, we just do, don’t we?
Deborah Christie Helicopter, helicopter parent, anybody that’s make it, please don’t write what a helicopter parent on the comments. I was just doing what I thought was please don’t write that.
Helen Wills Exactly, exactly. So on that basis, that our kids really don’t seem to have any fear. I mean, I know they do, but they don’t let us as parents know that they’ve got any fear about doing all sorts of stuff that could damage them and cause them problems. What are your tips for us as parents and them who are doing this, when they leave and go to university, which is for most of them probably the first time they’ll be away from home for prolonged periods of time, out of contact at times with their parents.
Deborah Christie So, well, the first thing I would say is that the first tip is to remember that you are an expert as a parent. You know that there is no, there are, the only parenting experts are parents. All parents know what they need to do for their kids. But as a result of that, the Abbott research showed that 91% of parents worry about their teenagers. So if you’re worrying about your teenagers, you’re incredibly normal, because nine out of 10 parents worry about their teenagers. So that’s the very, that’s the first thing to to not feel you know that you are a an awful parent for being excessively worried. And actually, I mean, it’s nearly eight out of 10, it’s 79%, so nearly eight out of 10 UK parents aren’t convinced their kids are ready to go off and be independent.
Helen Wills Good to know.
Deborah Christie So again, if you’re thinking, “Oh, I’ve done a dreadful job as a parent because my kids aren’t ready for independence,” you’re not alone. You know, there’s a in a room of 10 parents, there’ll only be two that are mistakenly believing that their kids are ready.
Helen Wills Yeah, but also, I’m guessing there’s another stat that says that when most of those kids go off unprepared and unready, they’re usually all right.
Deborah Christie Well, there is that. Yeah, absolutely. So, and, you know, I, as you know, Helen, from our work together, I actually never ever gave advice. I just always got you to discover the solutions within yourself. You know, it’s a sneaky way, sneaky, it’s a sneaky trick our psychologists like to do.
Helen Wills Yes, yeah. Well, but it works better that way, doesn’t it? As a counsellor, I now know this. If I tell someone what to do, it’s it’s going to kind of bounce off the edges. Whereas if I let them arrive at what they want to do, it it it creates change.
Deborah Christie Yeah. So helping, I think you know people can believe. And and I would say, you know, look at what you have done and look at examples of them being independent. Did they get to go to school on their own? Did you teach them to get on a bus and go to a school and survive secondary school? Did you teach them how to do that? So you you did that. How did you do that? What were the steps that you took to get them? And often parents will go, “Oh, well that was easy because I showed them the route and I helped them, you know, I helped them keep their money safe” and it wasn’t always successful because they’d lose their bus money, but I then helped them by showing, you know, so parents have already started to do that so they have done it successfully. So one of the things is look back on what you’ve already done successfully. I mean the other thing to do is, is to kind of have lots of conversations and I know that’s difficult because as I said kids are very good at being but you can do things in silence. You don’t actually have to talk but you know, do they know how to use the washing machine? Have you have you done something like say to them, “Put some washing on,” and then when they stand looking at it, you can say, “Oh, let me just show you how it works.” You know, so you can do things in a sneaky kind of way and you could have your own checklist depending on where they’re going of, you know, “skills that I want them to be good at.” So I’d like them to be able to do more than boil an egg so get them to cook the tea or cook the tea with you or I mean, again, my 12-year-old granddaughter, she’s she’s great. She’s a super duper cook. So no concerns about her. She might eat omelettes for a year if she was, but who cares?
Helen Wills Right, but she’ll survive.
Deborah Christie You know, that’s fine.
Helen Wills Yeah, exactly.
Deborah Christie And And the, and Zander, my grandson, he won a cooking competition at school. He’s actually adept at making chocolate fondants, the Master Chef disaster. He actually made chocolate…
Helen Wills I’m a I’m sure you can live on chocolate fondants.
Deborah Christie You can live on chocolate.
Helen Wills I reckon that’s possible.
Deborah Christie You do have to correct quite a lot for them.
Helen Wills If you’re diabetic, you’ve got to take some insulin.
Deborah Christie If you die about it, you do.
Helen Wills Yeah. Just be careful.
Deborah Christie Yeah, but so yeah so so there’s something about preparation and you know that they but yours perfect preparation is is one of those things you have to do. So lots of prepping so that you know if you did suddenly vanish off the scene then and you’re never ever going to vanish off the scene, that’s the other thing. You’ll always you’ll always be there. And yes,
Helen Wills Well, I think what you’re saying, the first point you made was trust yourself effectively. You’ve done this before when you and they didn’t know how and it was fine. And some things went wrong and things will go wrong, but you’ve always managed to sort it out and you will manage to sort it out. And then your other point is there’s things that they’re already good at. There’s things you can teach them. And I want to add to it. There’s things that you might not think to teach them, but there’s phones and social media now. And I’ve heard of countless parents who get around kind of six o’clock in the evening, their phones start to ping with, “Mum, how do you roast a potato?” And, “Is this the right temperature to cook a chicken?” And so we’ve got, they they’re they’re not, they will reach out if they know somebody. The roast potato thing is a personal one. They’re cooking a Christmas dinner. My daughter and her flatmates. And she’s like, “Your roast potatoes are the best. How do you do them? What’s the recipe?” I talked her through it. And no doubt, she’ll do a great job.
Deborah Christie Now, and that kind of does bring us back to technology. So again, there is a belief as an adult that technology is going to offer peace of mind. So what Abbott found when they did their survey was that, again, it’s quite high, actually, that over 9 out of 10, 92% of parents believe that technologies can provide peace of mind and offer support. Now, I think that has to come with a bit of a health warning. That’s what the parents believe. The young people can often find that really irritating. So from a personal perspective, Xander hates the fact that people can see his sugars. He hates hates it. But that’s tough, basically. And that’s kind of the message, which is, “Well, that’s OK, but I need to know, you know, mum needs to know that you are breathing, you know, that you’re functioning.”
Helen Wills Yeah, especially at his age, because once they’re over 18, it’s their decision. I have Maddie keeps me watching her numbers because she likes to know that I’m a safety net. She doesn’t hear her alarms sometimes in the night, but she’ll always hear my phone ring if I if I call her. So if I think she’s asleep and isn’t aware of a dangerous blood sugar, I’ll give her a call. And she keeps me following her for that reason. One day she’s gonna say, “Mum, I’m sick of it, I don’t need you anymore, stop.” And that’ll be really tough, but it’ll be good for me and I’ll switch off.
Deborah Christie Yeah. And And they will be able to tell you when they don’t need you anymore. And I think that’s the other thing. I, you know, that actually young people, and I remember this myself, so that young people often want to be independent, but dependent. And I use, it’s like interdependent. You’re not completely independent because nobody is, none of us unless we live all on our own with no contact with anybody in the world, then and only then are we independent, but you’re always dependent upon somebody. I, you know, I’m dependent upon my, you know, my husband and he’s dependent upon me we kind of, you know, cook tea together and drive places and your kids still come on holiday with you and it’s great to have things like sharing live locations. I do that when I get in a new bar. Am I supposed to say other taxis are available?
Helen Wills Yeah, you can say whatever you like on my podcast.
Deborah Christie Okay fine. Well when I get in one of those cars that you phoned up to get you I always share my location with my husband always. I’ve got it set up on my phone and I always share my location. He does say, “Why are you sharing your location?” I said, “So you know I’m safe, darling.” Yeah, but that’s that’s quite a nice one and again that one was is a good one. There’s instant messaging is great. I mean and all the kids are doing that they’re snapchatting and and everything like that. They’re all doing that.
Helen Wills Yeah, yeah, it’s just sensible. Exactly. They’re all interdependent with each other.
Deborah Christie And then for you know, for something like diabetes, of course, you’ve got, now and we talked about this earlier, you now have the ability to not need to prick your finger and to be able to notice when you’re in a situation the direction that your blood glucose is going and to then make a decision. And it’s about choice. People deserve choice and they can learn that if they chose not to do anything maybe they didn’t get the grade in that exam that they got or they and so they’ll think, “Well, you know what, the next time I will,” but people have to make their and we have to let people make their own mistakes too. You know, and that’s and I will put my hand up and say I have to. I have this ridiculous game that I play with myself where I go, “I’m being a grandma. I’m not a psychologist,” when I you know when I’m talking with Zander because what a pain in the neck to have a psychologist for a grandma.
Helen Wills Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, oh, well, I get that with, them I got told not to therapy someone last night on the sofa.
Deborah Christie Yeah, welcome, welcome to my world. Yes, that’s right. “Stop being a psychologist,” never.
Helen Wills I didn’t realise I was doing it, but I’m like, “Okay, yeah, thanks. Fair point.”
Deborah Christie No. Yeah, I know. But that all of that sort of stuff, you know, and I think it’s I think one of the great things about the Abbott research has is to help people is to reassure people that you’re not you’re not strange if you worry, that you’re not strange if you actually don’t feel your kids are ready to be independent. You might be wrong because they probably will be able to be independent enough but every parent you walk past there’s almost that that silent “I’m one of you” parent nod. You know, and and that actually technology can help, can provide peace of mind, even if it’s just your peace of mind.
Helen Wills Absolutely.
Deborah Christie And you might need to say that to your kids. And I used to say that to my boys. I used to say to them, “I’m not I’m not asking you to text me to make you feel better. I’m asking you to text me to make me feel better. Because when if something happens to you, I want to know how to get in the car and where to go to get you and so it’s not to make you feel better it’s entirely for me so do me do me do your mother a favour and just send me a text, you know that’s all you need to do or say, yeah, yeah.”
Helen Wills “Can you do that for me?” Yeah, yeah, yeah. Sometimes it’s just about explaining how it makes you feel when you are at sea without that information.
Deborah Christie Yeah. And I won’t, you know, “Mum, I’m staying at John’s tonight.” “Fine. Where does John live?” And nowadays, and now you can do a drop, “Just thanks, drop your pin.” And it’s no big deal. They just press a little button, drop a pin and you now know where John lives. And so you are, you’re in a situation where you can now actually go to sleep rather than the spend all night wide awake, which I have done occasionally over the years.
Helen Wills If you needed to. Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. How it must have been for our parents. I don’t know when there was no tech. Thank God for the tech. Deborah, is there somewhere where people can access this research and information and tips from the from the surveys that Abbott’s done?
Deborah Christie no I know. Well, ironically there was there was a little article that I wrote which was published in the Mail Online but people were really rude and I got trolled. Yeah, people were really horrible. They put these horrible comments on, but,
Helen Wills Oh okay. Well, that’s a whole other podcast.
Deborah Christie Well, absolutely. Yeah. Dealing dealing with trolls. But it was I think people took exception to the fact that they decided to do a headline that said I was a parenting expert, which, of course, made my which I know.
Helen Wills Oh, no one likes that.
Deborah Christie And of course, that then made my boys laugh hysterically because they said, “Expert? I don’t think so.” So that was fine. But I think I’m sure that there’s there must be a link that so Abbott can give you to the yeah.
Helen Wills I will find it. Yeah, so because I think these are all really interesting points. And I bet there’s there’s even more stuff that has come out of it that that some people will be interested in. So I will find that and I will drop it into the show notes for anybody that wants to delve into this a bit deeper.
Deborah Christie Yeah. And like, and I guess I wanted I guess I wanted just if it was all right, Helen, to say that, you know, adolescents living through adolescence as an adolescent and as the parent of an adolescent is tough. And And having a chronic condition will make it significantly more likely that you will face additional challenges. But I think it’s also important that people are listening need to remember that actually kids have more commonalities than differences, particularly kids with chronic conditions. They find ways to live their life well. And this whatever condition they have, it’s one little part of the jigsaw. It’s a quote that one of the young people I worked with and she said, “I realise that diabetes is just one one bit of the big, great, wonderful, exciting jigsaw that is my life.” And I’ve and I’ve never forgotten never forgotten that.
Helen Wills She sounds amazing.
Deborah Christie It’s and it’s And I think it’s really, and that was a young person that told me that. So I you know I do hope people just remember that they are doing their best as a parent and that’s all you can do. Do your best.
Helen Wills Yeah, no. Really good point. Debra, where can people find your book or anything else that can connect you with them?
Deborah Christie I’ve got a website now which is quite exciting which is .com. Yeah, so that’s my website and of course you can and you can actually just Google me and a lot of my papers and stuff will come up so.
Helen Wills Oh, perfect. I’ll put that link in too.
Deborah Christie If there’s a particular area of, if you put Debra Christie diabetes into Google, then some of the some of the papers come up. And there is a book that’s still available in Amazon, now on Kindle, which is good, because it’s it’s dead cheap on Kindle. And again, if you put Debra Christie and diabetes into Amazon then, and it’s so living with diabetes for children and families, psychosocial psychosocial issues, psychosocial aspects of diabetes, for children, adolescents, and families.
Helen Wills Right. Which said Which sounds like a really technical way of saying it’s about how you’re feeling and what’s going on in your life and around you.
Deborah Christie That was the Yeah, that’s right. Yeah. And it’s got look it’s it’s some it’s It’s a bit old now, but it’s still I think the the chapters on understanding the emotional issues, you know the the the technical stuff about diabetes management needs needs updating. I hope the publisher’s listening. that and we, you know, it could do with being redone, but all of the stuff all the stuff about how you manage the living with it, the really important stuff, how you manage the emotional demands and the social demands and the psychological ones.
Helen Wills That’s never gonna change, is it?
Deborah Christie That’s never going to change there. That’s exactly the same. Tech might help make it a little bit easier, but basically what comes down to is you know just finding a way to to get on with your life and do your best.
Helen Wills Yes, exactly that. Thank you Deborah for that insight and I will put all of those links into the show notes for anybody who wants to know a bit more or connect with Deborah.