Teach children about their conditions

When a child has a condition that they are going to have for the rest of their life, it’s important that they grow up with an understanding of themselves. You might wonder, what the best age is to start teaching them about their conditions. To answer that, I ask you this; does your child even possibly overhear you talking about their condition?

Consider child cancer patients for a moment. So many of them are such troopers. They take their cancer as a simple fact of life because it’s what they have known. If you ever want to see what bravery in a child looks like, that’s where to find it. And that’s how a lifelong condition should be presented to a child, as just a fact of life.

That’s not meant to belittle the condition at all, but your child has to learn how to live with it, control it, and work with it. My son knows he has a form of autism. I work to teach him that it’s not an excuse in life rather something he has the challenge of working with. While we need to understand that his condition causes him to see the feel the world in louder proportions that typical or “normal”, he must practice understanding that in himself. He must practice at working around it.

Not all conditions can be worked around, or parts of them any way. Some parts can however. We must teach them that having these conditions is not an excuse not to try in life and that takes practice. For us all, it takes practice. We have to remember that we are raising our children to become adults. And while we advocate for them and bid for understanding and acceptance of a cold hearted society, we must also make sure they understand themselves.