Parents of Children With Diabetes: What Are They Worried About?

Parental worries, specific to having a child with diabetes, have been associated with poor diabetes control. This study addressed three questions relating to this issue: Does parental worry affect the metabolic control of the child with IDDM? What specific aspects of diabetes are the most worrisome to parents? Do these concerns change with the child's age and disease duration? Parents of 93 children with IDDM were given a modified version of the Diabetes Quality of Life measure to evaluate diahetes-specific worries. No correlation was found between parental worry and the child's metabolic control. Parents of younger children expressed the largest amount of worry, yet the kinds of things that parents were most concerned about were the same, regardless of age or duration of the child's disease.