Parenting The Chronically Ill — Hospital Discipline

I honestly think the hardest thing for Bit and myself is maintaining discipline in the hospital. We still have to have consistent rules and behaviors, but it is so hard because well, you are in the hospital. There is a huge factor of the unknown, which changes children’s behaviors. The change in routine is hard, and then toss in the parental guilt for being there and wanting to fix everything and it is easy to let them get away with things you normally wouldn’t. This would be less of an issue if being inpatient was an anomaly, but when it isn’t how do you balance?

Image Credit: Children’s Hospital of Ireland

We try hard to not be inpatient, but it happens, more often than we’d like. Sure, her chores go out the wayside when we are there, but the rest of our home guidelines have to be followed. You don’t get to yell at adults, you don’t get to throw tantrums, you have to be kind and respectful, your school work must be done. I get to be the “mean one” enforcing this, but because in the foreseeable future her life is not going to change, we need to learn to cope. There have to still be consequences for acting like a butt to people, but you can’t ground a kid who is inpatient, how do you balance this? We still enact consequences for behaviors, often its reduced screen time, and we offer treats for excellent behavior, and we spend time talking about why the behavior is wrong, and what we can do…