My son was diagnosed in Novemebr, and although he is a teenage and able bodied, he is also Learning disabled with dyslexia.
This effects his reading and calculation abilities so Carb counting is a big struggle and he gets overwhelmed. (Oh and annoyed with me, imagine that :)) As a result he may never be able to calculate it alone and easily makes mistakes with a regular calculator.
Is there an app or a special calculator out there to help ? Or a special device. We are currently changing doctors as they have been quite disapointing in their teaching. The keep "forgetting" he is LD and just hand him these books to read and learn carb counting ourselves :( :(
If anyone out there has an LD kid, they may identify with the frustration with this and I would love some feed back. I am still stunned some days with this diagnosis, but it seems to be getting better as time goes by.
My son is only 5 and he is not LD (that we know of) so, I will give some suggestions for managing a younger child who can't carb count yet.
Carb counting can be difficult, but with practice it becomes a lot easier. Many foods are similar. See if you can work with a dietician or nutritionist that can help. We were taught some pretty basic rules of thumb that help in guesstimating. Part of what will help him might be just learning a certain lunch (a sandwich, an apple, a bag of chips, some carrots) are X carbs so he gets ___ units of insulin for it. Then he could eat that same lunch every day. For my son, he has lunch at school so I carb count his hot lunch every week and then the lunch ladies measure out what I say to give him and a teacher keeps track of what he eats. Might be something to consider with the school until your son is more comfortable.
My son's insulin pump also has a list of food choices and carb amounts loaded in it. I rarely use it, but it does come in handy and it might be easier for your son. (Of course, it would be very fast to put him on a pump, but some endo's will do it as fast as you want (our clinic did). With his pump, we just enter in the carb total and the pump does the rest of the math using settings I've loaded in (with his endo). It makes it much more fool proof.
Some things that help us when we are traveling is that I measure out amounts into a sandwich bag and then write on the bag the amount. Or using 3x5 cards to write down the foods and give a total so that he knows what to eat.
I'm sorry your training has been less than what you expected. I am so thankful that ours was very in depth and the trainers were willing to spend as much time as we needed to learn how. It is a LOT to learn. So keep looking until you find a care team that will work for you - they are out there.