Asthma, Behavior, and Clueless Parents

If your child has asthma, or might have asthma, you may want to learn all you can about it rather than relying on the bits and pieces you learn at office visits or in the ER. Besides giving your child better care, this may result in happier, better behaved kids, according to a study in the September 2003 Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology.

The less that parents are familiar with asthma (especially from having asthma themselves or having it in the family), the more likely that the children will develop behavioral difficulties. Parents may expect too much from their kids. On the other hand, they may back off from expectations because the child has asthma or because they don’t want to provoke a wheezing episode.

Learning to understand asthma and to approach it with calm, capable confidence is a great gift to yourself as well as to your child.