Dogs, Cats, and Diabetes

All developmental stages pose unique challenges for families. The transition from childhood to adolescence is often difficult for families to understand and deal with effectively. Parents of adolescents must find ways to let go of some of the control while still remaining close to their child. This is difficult when adolescents are prone to rebellion, defiance of convention, and separation from family. Health care providers who work with adolescents with diabetes have reported that adolescent patients are often the most difficult patients. It may be, however, that adolescents are not so difficult. Rather, it may be that the developmental transition to adolescence requires different strategies for relating to adolescents versus younger children. A useful way to understand this developmental transition is to compare and contrast how one may interact with a dog versus a cat.¹

Dogs are much like children in that they are dependent on others, enjoy being around a variety of people, tend to respond to discipline, and are usually up for just about anything. Cats, on the other hand, are more like adolescents. Cats are independent, enjoy their solitude, need a great deal of cajoling to do things, and are difficult to discipline. Both dogs and cats enjoy affection from their caregivers. Dogs typically are open to any type of affection: belly rubs, ear scratches, rough-and-tumble play, and so forth. Cats, however, require affection on their own terms. One has to think like a cat to know how to approach the cat to give it affection. Otherwise, the caregiver risks rejection from the cat. There are many striking parallels between dogs and cats on the one hand and children and adolescents on the other.

Despite the differences between cats and dogs (or children and adolescents), they both need affection, involvement, and limit setting. Roberts et al. …