Category: Kids

The 6 Stages of Allergy Parenting

4/28/2022

Have you ever noticed that so much of the parenting guidance out there is focused on what children are going through at each stage of their development? While that's helpful information for parents to know, it doesn't tell parents what THEIR parenting tasks are for each stage of their child's development.

That's where Ellen Galinsky's work comes in! Her research led to the development of the Six Stages of Parenthood, which focuses on how PARENTS develop at the same time their child develops.

This framework helps parents understand if they're focusing on the appropriate tasks associated with their child's stage of development, are falling behind, or pushing too fast too quickly.

As with any guidelines, they're just that - guidelines. They're not hard and fast rules. However, I think we can all agree that parenting is hard, so any helpful guidance is welcome!

The Six Stages of Allergy Parenting

Adapted from Ellen Galinsky's work, licensed family therapist and founder of this Food Allergy Counselor Directory and website, Tamara Hubbard developed the Six Stages of Allergy Parenting after recognizing that allergy parents could benefit from parenting guidance specific to allergy parenting and the associated emotional aspects.

This purpose of this framework is primarily to offer guidance related to the emotional aspects of allergy parenting, which is often overlooked in allergy parenting guidance currently available. It essentially offers parents a framework to help them develop their mindset and parenting choices for each stage of parenting, which directly impacts their child's ability to learn how to live confidently with allergies. While overall allergy management skills/goals are noted for each phase, the guidance is heavily infused with information related to the allergy emotional tasks helpful for parents to be aware of and/or develop during each stage.

Six Stage of Allergy Parenting chart, created by Tamara Hubbard, LCPC

How to Use this Chart:
The information below explains each column in more depth:

Stages: The names of each stage are from Ellen Galinsky's work. These titles are used to identify the period of time associated with the child's development, but are instead focused on the parental growth process, which happens in tandem with the child's growth process.
Acts As The.... Tamara created these labels to help further illustrate a parent's role and goals for each stage.
Child's Age: Identifies the age and stage of the child's development.
Parents' Goals: Summarizes the overall goals for parents for each stage of their child's development, based on Ellen Galinsky's research.
Allergy Tasks: Summarizes the overall allergy parenting task/focus for each stage of a child's development. Each stage builds upon the previous stages.

How This Framework Helps Allergy Parents:
The Six Stages of Allergy Parenting offers allergy parents a framework to help them better understand how to parent an allergic child throughout the child, teen and young adult years. More specifically, this guidance helps parents with:

Identifying When Emotions Are Getting in the Way: Offers the ability to identify if your own parental anxiety, fear, and overwhelm has actually stunted your child's ability to learn how to navigate life with their allergies OR has resulted in trying to teach your child too much, too quickly in order to calm your intense emotions.
Assessing Their Own Progress: Offers a way to more effectively assess whether you're on or off target with the main parenting focuses for each stage of development, as allergy parenting adds an additional layer to the mix.
Teaching Allergy Skills: Offers a look at the overall allergy management and allergy emotional skills you should focus on teaching your child at each stage. This is important because children learn through scaffolding, or building upon previously learned concepts. Therefore, it's helpful if their allergy AND emotional skills build throughout their development. For example, if a child reaches adolescence and is missing basic allergy management skills, it will be hard for them to reach adolescent goals, such as learning to take more responsibility for their safety and being away from home on their own.
Checking For Emotional and Knowledge Gaps: Offers a framework to help see if you and/or your children need to revisit allergy emotional or allergy management skills. This can often be the case if the last allergic reaction happened many years ago, and you've become more comfortable managing allergies. It's helpful to do a quick check at the beginning of each stage of development to see if you need to revisit forgotten or lost skills from previous stages, fill any knowledge gaps, or assess emotional readiness.

Want More Specific Information on Each Stage?
Stay tuned for more detailed information for each of the six stages of allergy parenting, including specific parenting tasks and potential roadblocks to watch out for. (FAC on IG: @FoodAllergyCounselor, FAC on FB: /FoodAllergyCounselor, and FAC on Twitter: @FACounselor).

[Edited to add the new post: The 6 Stages of Allergy Parenting Explained]

If you want to make sure you don't miss more of this kind of psychosocial information, be sure to Subscribe to The Food Allergy Counselor emails (at the bottom of the homepage or via the pop-up), as well as the FAC social media accounts. And THE BONUS for subscribing to the FAC emails? You'll get the free, 3-page Allergy Anxiety & Overwhelm Mini -Guide.

Think This Chart Will Help Others?
Think this chart will help others you know, or your patients? Please feel free to share it as long as the copyright information is visible.

And if you're needing more allergy-related psychosocial support, don't forget to check out the Food Allergy Counselor Directory, the Exploring Food Allergy Families podcast, the Food Allergy Behavioral Health Resource section, and the allergy-specific therapeutic worksheets.

Do you value the Food Allergy Counselor Directory and the support it provides to the allergy community? Want to see it expand with additional providers? Contact founder Tamara Hubbard, LCPC for sponsorship opportunities!

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A helpful parenting framework: Galinsky's stages of parenthood

2/29/2020

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When a child receives a food allergy diagnosis, it's common for parents to feel overwhelmed. Worrying thoughts may fill parents' minds with doubt and concern about how (and if) they will be able to prepare their food allergic child well enough to navigate this world on their one day.

It's important for parents to remember that time plays a key factor here!

It takes 9 months for a baby to develop and be ready for the outside world.

A kindergartner has over a decade of schooling to prepare himself/herself for college or work.

Similarly, food allergic kids acquire their skills over time, learning and applying them during each phase of development.

GALINKSY'S SIX STAGES OF PARENTHOOD

The childhood stages of development can provide parents with benchmarks to help assess their own child's growth and progress. While this is useful information, it doesn't necessarily help parents understand their role at each stage of development.

Ellen Galinsky, president and cofounder of the Families and Work Institute, conducted research that led to the development of the six stages of parenting. These six distinct stages offers parents a framework to help them understand not only what's happening during that age range, but what their tasks and goals might be.

Taking this information one step further, I created the image below as part of a food allergy parenting webinar I presented in 2019 (click link to watch it for free), which includes a basic overview of the food allergic parent's tasks for each stage of parenthood. Additionally, I added descriptive titles (in bold) for each stage to help highlight the parenting role for each stage.

how is a parenting framework helpful?

While the parental task list in the previous image seems simplistic, and certainly would include more than is listed above, this framework can help parents assess things such as:

Am I helping my child develop the skills appropriate for this age/stage?
What are my overall parenting goals for this current stage?
Should I be focusing more on skills that will help my child transition to their next age/stage?
Am I still doing too much for my child at their age, hindering them from learning age-appropriate skills they need to acquire?
Am I spending too much time worrying about things that are in a future stage?

A framework such as this is a helpful reminder that as parents, the goal isn't to teach kids every skill they need right away. A child's age, stage of development, and personality helps guide when and how to teach necessary life skills.

It's also a reminder that what parents teach their children in one stage sets the foundation for teaching the skills within the next stage of development and parenting. Kindergarteners managing food allergies build upon the basic skills parents have taught them as preschoolers. Food allergic high schoolers are learning additional skills and practicing strategies needed for them to develop into young adults that know how to manage their own healthcare needs.

So remember parents....
Rome wasn't built in a day, nor is a fully-prepared young adult managing their food allergies. Use the gift of time and reminders of your parenting role at each stage of your child's development to help guide your skill-building activities.....and hopefully help your worried mind believe that you can do this!

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Two Ways to Help Kids Build Food Allergy-Related Self-Esteem

5/22/2019

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Image Credit: Pixabay (Geralt)

We're all familiar with the term self-esteem, but it can be hard to describe it in a concrete manner.

In the simplest of terms, self-esteem is a positive sense of self. Having self-esteem often fuels confidence, pride, belief in self, a sense of belonging, and a positive self-image. Kids with poor self-esteem tend to be more self-critical, focus on perceived failures, doubt their abilities, and believe they don't measure up to their peers.

Per psychologist Dr. Paul Foxman, we develop self-esteem in two ways:

Positive input from primary caregivers that is then internalized
Experiences of success, mastery and competency

The first point probably seems like common sense. When parents and caregivers acknowledge and celebrate a child's accomplishments, as well as their values and choices, it helps the development of positive self-talk within the child.

At first glance, the second point may also seem like common sense, but let's dig a little deeper to explore how parental fear may inadvertently become a factor in the development of a child's self-esteem relating to their ability to self-manage their food allergy.

TWO WAYS TO HELP KIDS DEVELOP FOOD ALLERGY-RELATED SELF-ESTEEM:

Provide Opportunities to Learn Food Allergy Skills From a Young AgeBecause many kids are diagnosed with their food allergy at very young ages, the parents/caregivers are responsible for the child's safety. But when it comes to self-management of food allergies, kids need to begin learning these skills from a young age (in age-appropriate ways). Just as they learn developmental skills such as walking and talking, food allergy management skills should truly be taught as commonly as any other life skills parents teach their kids.

It may seem easier to do things for them as long as possible. You may choose to carry their epinepherine for them because they're a forgetful 9 year old. But all that does is deprive them of opportunities to master these skills and develop confidence, both which impact food allergy-related self-esteem. If you continue to do or complete tasks for them, they will simply end up being a 16 year old that forgets their epinepherine.

Many times, when parents continue to do things for their kids instead of modeling and allowing for practice (which includes mistakes), it's either because they're uncomfortable relinquishing control, or because they're underestimating their child's abilities. These reasons tend to be fueled by the the fear of what will happen if you're not in charge of everything. If you find yourself resisting the idea of passing more food allergy responsibility over to your child, honestly ask yourself:
- Am I resisting due to my own fear of the "what ifs"?
- Do I believe my child is capable of learning to be responsible for their safety? If not, why?
- How can I learn to deal with potential mistakes, which are common when kids are learning new skills?

Focus on Strengths - Especially When Mistakes Are Made
Sometimes, it's too easy to focus on what your child didn't do well. Phrases like "Don't do it like that" or "Just let me do it for you" roll off the tongue too easily for many parents, typically due to their own lack of patience or frustration tolerance. But the reality is that as kids are learning new skills, they're going to make mistakes and initially, may not accomplish these tasks very well.

Since one way kids develop good self-esteem relates to positive input from parents/caregivers, it's important to focus on strengths whenever possible. That doesn't mean simply saying "Good job" or handing out tons of empty praise. Rather, focus on the process of their skill development, and compliment them on their efforts.

Maybe an elementary-aged child misses a key ingredient while learning to read labels. A response such as "I see you took your time reading that label, which is wonderful! But let's go back and read it together, just to be sure" would be interpreted more positively than one such as "You have to be sure to read labels better, or else you could have a reaction!" which may be fueled by the parent's own fear of "what if".

A high schooler may forget his epinepherine because he was rushing out the door to get to school. You could say "We've been telling you since you were little that you have to bring your epinepherine with you everywhere! Why can't you seem to remember that?!" or you could get the same underlying meaning across with a strengths-based message, such as "You're so great at remembering your football gear every day for practice after school. What can you do to remember your epinepherine like that daily?" Focus your responses on what they ARE doing well, or connect it with strengths of theirs that, when applied, may help them master their food allergy management skills.

Remember....kids that develop confidence in managing food allergies become adults who are able to navigate life with food allergies. The opportunities you allow and approach you take to teaching them food allergy management skills directly impacts their self-esteem and internal self-talk about their ability to handle food allergy-related situations.

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The 6 Stages of Allergy Parenting

The Six Stages of Allergy Parenting

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