5 Effective Tips for Helping Your Child with Epilepsy

Helping your child with epilepsy is vital if they are to cope with it as they get older. It isn’t easy to witness, let alone experience, but there are some practical ways to provide support.

5 Effective Tips for Helping Your Child with Epilepsy

1. Provide Physical Comfort

Epilepsy can be mild, with symptoms hardly noticeable (petit-mal). Or it can be violent with unconscious seizures (grand-mal).

In-between, and perhaps the worst, are seizures where a patient is aware and cannot do anything (focal). However, any of these can cause muscle spasms leading to severe injury, aches, and pains. Therefore, physical comfort is crucial.

You can make your child comfy in bed using the best mattress for shoulder pain and muscle relief you can afford. A lot of rest and recovery is required depending on the type of epilepsy.

2. Explain their Condition

Many children are among the 65 million people who experience epileptic seizures worldwide. It’s fascinating that children deal with medical conditions differently than adults.

Essentially, they just get on with it in a state of blissful ignorance. However, it’s vital that they understand their situation for later in life.

You can help by explaining to your child what epilepsy is, their type, and how it will affect their lives. It’s also crucial that they understand it’s nothing to be embarrassed about, although that is hard to accept later.

3. Encourage Keeping a Journal

A tried and tested method of understanding and managing conditions is keeping a journal. Journals can help you deal with things when you write them down, kind of purging your emotions.

However, there is an added benefit for your child with epilepsy. Keeping track of seizures can help identify triggers and track the frequency and duration.

This information can then be used to make lifestyle changes, avoid specific activities or prescribe the proper medication. Triggers for epilepsy can be foods, drinks, emotions, and light or sound.

4. Help with Managing Medication

Finding the proper epilepsy medication is something of a challenge. Sometimes you can get lucky, and the first one prescribed works.

Tegretol Carbamazepine anticonvulsant tablets are the most widely used epilepsy treatment. However, there are many more. And even if you quickly find a drug that works, the dosage is a key issue. Too little, and seizures continue.

Too much, and you risk the adverse effects of an overdose. Getting to the correct dosage can be trial and error. Still, eventually, you can help in increments to the stage where seizures are stabilized.

5. Educate Those Around You

Finally, your children’s siblings and anyone who comes into contact with them must understand the severity of epilepsy.

For instance, there is an extreme risk of head injury during a seizure, so carers and teachers must know how to manage an episode without resorting to misconceptions.

These include holding your child down to avoid movement, putting a bit in their mouth, and picking them up off the floor following the seizure. Holding them down limits movement and will cause injury. A bit will cause mouth damage, and rest is crucial when postictal.

Summary

Epilepsy affects millions of children. You can help your epileptic child by making them comfortable, helping to manage their condition, and making sure others help correctly.

Julie Higgins
Author
Julie is a Staff Writer at momooze.com. She has been working in publishing houses before joining the editorial team at momooze. Julie's love and passion are topics around beauty, lifestyle, hair and nails.