JUVENILE DIABETES: Build on Kid Power
Healthy lessons for kids and parents
BY:MARC LICHTER
There's plenty for parents and kids to do together to learn about and get comfortable with living with diabetes. Besides cooking together to learn to create healthy, balanced, diabetes-friendly meals, there are books to read and websites to visit.
Go to the American Diabetes Association's online Youth Zone for an assortment of games, all of which teach about the body, the activities that benefit it and how to properly fuel it. Among the fun you'll find:
Build a Healthy Kid—Choose an activity, select foods and watch them get processed through a kid-building machine to see if the child you've created is sick, healthy, or maybe even super!
Fix Frank—Find out about parts of the body involved with ingestion, digestion and insulin production while you piece together a friendly monster. A mad scientist is there to help.
Build a Healthy Plate—Take aim at various foods with your fork a la Space Invaders to put together a healthful meal. Info boxes let you know what types of food are missing or on what you've overloaded.
Food Safari—Find the healthful foods within the jungle drawing...and try not to eat the elephant!
Offline, we suggest 101 Tips for Raising Healthy Kids with Diabetes by Laura Hieronymus, MSEd, APRN, BC-ADM, CDE and Patti Geil, MS, RD, FADA, CDE, published by the American Diabetes Association. Done in a Q&A format, it covers tots to teens with info on medical matters, activities, diet and more.
For more on Kids and Diabetes, click on:
JUVENILE DIABETES: THE EARLY YEARS
JUVENILE DIABETES: TWEENS AND TEENS
JUVENILE DIABETES: WORKING WITH SCHOOLS AND CAMPS
JUVENILE DIABETES: HOW TO MUNCH A HEALTHY LUNCH