In Which My Tween and My Teen Aren't as Responsible as Adults (But For Some Reason that Surprises Me)

News flash: 8 year olds and 14 year olds aren't adults. You would think I would know this, and I do of course in theory, but sometimes I still find myself expecting my kids to act like adults when it comes to their decision-making ability. That came up in different ways for both kids this week.

Though I've gotten better about not compulsively checking my Dexcom share app, I do still often take a peak shortly before her lunchtime and sometime in the afternoon (her lunch period, for some unfathomable reason, falls at 10:35am). When I checked before lunch her bg was coasting in the 80's, which is a totally awesome number to be at right before a meal. I figured she might actually stay in range for the whole school day, which isn't super common and would be totally awesome.

When I looked again shortly after noon, her bg was nearly 300 and still climbing. I could not for the life of me figure out how that could have happened. I'd allowed her to switch from greek yogurt tubes to gogurt tubes, which have a little more sugar. Could that have made such a big difference? We'd had an issue with a bad pump site a few days earlier. Could it have been happening again?

There was nothing I could do until I picked her up at 2:45. I checked her pump as soon as we left the building, intending to look through the history and try to figure out what happened before giving a correction. I didn't need to go that far, however, her pump was still on the "confirm bolus" screen from lunch, which means that she did not deliver any insulin for the lunch she ate.

To my credit, I learned a lesson after I reduced her to tears for not bolusing for her snack at Girls on the Run in the fall. I didn't get angry. I told her what I saw, explained that I was relieved there was such a simple explanation for her high blood sugar, then gave her a correction and sent her on her way.

Internally, however, I was pretty annoyed both that a) she forgot to complete a process she does EVERY.SINGLE.DAY. and b) the teacher didn't notice. When I reflected on it, though, I realized that it's actually expecting a lot to give my still relatively young child responsibility (even very part time) to take over for one of her organs that stopped doing part of its job. Under normal circumstances, kids without allergies can just eat without thinking about it. It's not as if she willfully sat down and ate her lunch without pulling out her insulin pump. She entered the information. She just forgot to deliver the insulin.

Diabetes, as much as I hate this fact, is a marathon, not a sprint. Barring a cure (which I don't think will happen until Kittygirl is a young adult, best case scenario), Kittygirl will have to deal with this disease her entire life, long after I'm done raising her and having at least some responsibility for her actions. My job is to teach her to manage her diabetes as well as I can, and to try to do so gently so as to either make burnout as a teen or young adult unlikely or something she has the tools to overcome.

In another venue altogether, Squirrelboy reminded us this week that he's still not completely responsible. Monday night he was caught using his phone in an unapproved way later at night than he's allowed to use his phone for anything other than listening to books before falling asleep. He wasn't accessing anything objectionable, but he was breaking hard and fast rules nonetheless, and the phone history showed it wasn't the first time.

Understandably, Mr. Engineer was pretty upset when he caught him. I was already in bed when it happened, but I heard about it in the morning. Squirrelboy had lost his phone for the day, and he came into the living room in the morning crying. I thought he was crying about losing the phone, but it turns out that what really upset him was that he had disappointed his dad and he was afraid Mr. Engineer would never trust him again.

I assured him that that wasn't the case, but he didn't stop being stressed and nervous until he and Mr. Engineer had had a talk about the incident after dinner. This reaction actually made me happy, because it shows we're doing a pretty good job as parents. If our teenager breaks a rule and his main cause of distress is having possibly lost his dad's trust, I call that a parenting win.

New rules have been set, including the phone charger being moved to our bedroom and the phone being plugged in to charge before bedtime and not moving until the morning. Perhaps we should have done this to begin with, but, as a general rule, we prefer to let our kids have a good amount of responsibility unless and until they show they aren't ready for it.

That applies to both diabetes responsibilities and general life responsibilities. Sometimes it turns out well. Other times it doesn't, but the way we react to those times (like, say, not freaking out about a high blood sugar caused by user error but rather using it as a teaching moment) has the potential to teach our kids a lot.