When Your Child Has a Chronic Medical Illness


Book Description

Written by leading mental health professionals, this warm and accessible parenting book for children with chronic illnesses offers clear, practical guidance for all aspects of the journey. When you're focused on ensuring your child gets the best possible treatments for their symptoms, it's easy to overlook or dismiss the impact the illness can have on your relationships and emotions. This book places your psychological well-being front and center, so you can be the best caregiver possible for your child.




What's Making Our Children Sick?


Book Description

Exploring the links between GM foods, glyphosate, and gut health With chronic disorders among American children reaching epidemic levels, hundreds of thousands of parents are desperately seeking solutions to their children’s declining health, often with little medical guidance from the experts. What’s Making Our Children Sick? convincingly explains how agrochemical industrial production and genetic modification of foods is a culprit in this epidemic. Is it the only culprit? No. Most chronic health disorders have multiple causes and require careful disentanglement and complex treatments. But what if toxicants in our foods are a major culprit, one that, if corrected, could lead to tangible results and increased health? Using patient accounts of their clinical experiences and new medical insights about pathogenesis of chronic pediatric disorders—taking us into gut dysfunction and the microbiome, as well as the politics of food science—this book connects the dots to explain our kids’ ailing health. What’s Making Our Children Sick? explores the frightening links between our efforts to create higher-yield, cost-efficient foods and an explosion of childhood morbidity, but it also offers hope and a path to effecting change. The predicament we now face is simple. Agroindustrial “innovation” in a previous era hoped to prevent the ecosystem disaster of DDT predicted in Rachel Carson’s seminal book in 1962, Silent Spring. However, this industrial agriculture movement has created a worse disaster: a toxic environment and, consequently, a toxic food supply. Pesticide use is at an all-time high, despite the fact that biotechnologies aimed to reduce the need for them in the first place. Today these chemicals find their way into our livestock and food crop industries and ultimately onto our plates. Many of these pesticides are the modern day equivalent of DDT. However, scant research exists on the chemical soup of poisons that our children consume on a daily basis. As our food supply environment reels under the pressures of industrialization via agrochemicals, our kids have become the walking evidence of this failed experiment. What’s Making Our Children Sick? exposes our current predicament and offers insight on the medical responses that are available, both to heal our kids and to reverse the compromised health of our food supply.




Ways to Help Chronically Ill Children


Book Description

All kids get sick now and then, but children who suffer from chronic illnesses don’t recover quickly from their diseases. They have to deal with being sick for long periods of time, sometimes indefinitely. Dealing with a chronic illness is no fun. Often it means staying in the hospital or at home, away from school and friends. It can also mean enduring painful medical procedures. All of this can make a chronically ill child feel sad, scared, and lonely at times. You may wonder if there is anything you can do to help. Whether you already know a person with a chronic illness or you want to make some new friends, the best gift you can give is your time. This book discusses ten different ways that you can help a child who must deal with a chronic illness. Some of the ideas are big, others are small, but all of them can make a true difference in the life of a chronically ill child.




America's Children


Book Description

America's Children is a comprehensive, easy-to-read analysis of the relationship between health insurance and access to care. The book addresses three broad questions: How is children's health care currently financed? Does insurance equal access to care? How should the nation address the health needs of this vulnerable population? America's Children explores the changing role of Medicaid under managed care; state-initiated and private sector children's insurance programs; specific effects of insurance status on the care children receive; and the impact of chronic medical conditions and special health care needs. It also examines the status of "safety net" health providers, including community health centers, children's hospitals, school-based health centers, and others and reviews the changing patterns of coverage and tax policy options to increase coverage of private-sector, employer-based health insurance. In response to growing public concerns about uninsured children, last year Congress voted to provide $24 billion over five years for new state insurance initiatives. This volume will serve as a primer for concerned federal policymakers and regulators, state agency officials, health plan decisionmakers, health care providers, children's health advocates, and researchers.




When Your Children Hurt


Book Description

There are no easy answers to life’s problems. This is especially true when a loved one is hurting. In When Your Children Hurt, Dr. Charles Stanley addresses many of the issues families face when a child is fighting a long-term illness, the effects of abuse, or other issues such as drugs or immorality. It’s during those times when feelings of hopelessness can quickly become despair. Dr. Stanley reminds us, “God has an answer for our deepest need, but we must seek His help.” How do you deal with the heartache of watching your child face painful situations? There is only one way: through faith in Jesus Christ. You can spend a lifetime trying to fix a situation that only He can mend. Or you can trust Him and watch Him work mightily to bring hope to your most hopeless situation.




How to Be Sick


Book Description

This life-affirming, instructive, and thoroughly inspiring book is a must-read for anyone who is - or who might one day be - sick. It can also be the perfect gift of guidance, encouragement, and uplifting inspiration to family, friends, and loved ones struggling with the many terrifying or disheartening life changes that come so close on the heels of a diagnosis of a chronic condition or life-threatening illness. Authentic and graceful, How to be Sick reminds us of our limitless inner freedom, even under high degrees of suffering and pain. The author - who became ill while a university law professor in the prime of her career - tells the reader how she got sick and, to her and her partner's bewilderment, stayed that way. Toni had been a longtime meditator, going on long meditation retreats and spending many hours rigorously practicing, but soon discovered that she simply could no longer engage in those difficult and taxing forms. She had to learn ways to make "being sick" the heart of her spiritual practice - and through truly learning how to be sick, she learned how, even with many physical and energetic limitations, to live a life of equanimity, compassion, and joy. And whether we ourselves are ill or not, we can learn these vital arts from Bernhard's generous wisdom in How to Be Sick.




Working and Caring for a Child with Chronic Illness


Book Description

Using an innovative, action research approach, Vickers explores the lives of women who work full time while caring for a child with significant chronic illness or disability. She demonstrates that such women can be disconnected from those around them, unsupported and overwhelmed with responsibility at home and work.




Parenting Matters


Book Description

Decades of research have demonstrated that the parent-child dyad and the environment of the familyâ€"which includes all primary caregiversâ€"are at the foundation of children's well- being and healthy development. From birth, children are learning and rely on parents and the other caregivers in their lives to protect and care for them. The impact of parents may never be greater than during the earliest years of life, when a child's brain is rapidly developing and when nearly all of her or his experiences are created and shaped by parents and the family environment. Parents help children build and refine their knowledge and skills, charting a trajectory for their health and well-being during childhood and beyond. The experience of parenting also impacts parents themselves. For instance, parenting can enrich and give focus to parents' lives; generate stress or calm; and create any number of emotions, including feelings of happiness, sadness, fulfillment, and anger. Parenting of young children today takes place in the context of significant ongoing developments. These include: a rapidly growing body of science on early childhood, increases in funding for programs and services for families, changing demographics of the U.S. population, and greater diversity of family structure. Additionally, parenting is increasingly being shaped by technology and increased access to information about parenting. Parenting Matters identifies parenting knowledge, attitudes, and practices associated with positive developmental outcomes in children ages 0-8; universal/preventive and targeted strategies used in a variety of settings that have been effective with parents of young children and that support the identified knowledge, attitudes, and practices; and barriers to and facilitators for parents' use of practices that lead to healthy child outcomes as well as their participation in effective programs and services. This report makes recommendations directed at an array of stakeholders, for promoting the wide-scale adoption of effective programs and services for parents and on areas that warrant further research to inform policy and practice. It is meant to serve as a roadmap for the future of parenting policy, research, and practice in the United States.




A Compromised Generation


Book Description

The media has called attention to new ?epidemics? of chronic illness in children, including ADHD, autism, food allergies, asthma, and obesity. Are they real, and if so, why are so many children getting sick? This book, rooted in scientific literature, answers these questions for parents. Many children considered healthy by their pediatricians show subtle signs of ill health. The author explains how to prevent these illnesses, and how to help those who are already ill.




Raising Children With Chronic Illness


Book Description

This is an inspiring, heartfelt story of a mother's journey in raising two children who were diagnosed with very serious health problems at birth. The mother has a unique perspective as both a psychologist and registered nurse as she and her husband diligently worked to provide the best life possible for each child. The determination and perseverance this family showed in fighting for each child's very existence is quite remarkable. The youngest child who was born with a severe case of cystic fibrosis required a liver transplant as a teenager and later a double lung transplant in his early twenties. He is now thirty years of age doing well and working as a registered nurse. His older brother who had breathing trouble at birth contracted a virus later in childhood that resulted in ulcerative colitis requiring a complete colectomy. He is now thirty-two years of age. He is thriving and doing well working in the medical field. A nice dimension to the book is that each boy is interviewed and asked what it was like living with a chronic illness as a child and now as an adult. Each boy's advice to parents of chronically ill children is meant to be of support to parents in their life journey in raising their child.