I was just recently diagnosed earlier this year and my step-kids are already teenagers. Since I have been diagnosed, we talk freely, honestly, and openly in our house about what bipolar is, answering any questions to the best of our ability so they have a pretty good understanding that I'm not "crazy" but yes, we do make light of the situation and joke at times about it in order to keep the conversation going and to make it not awkward. We encourage curiosity. So when they say, "What's that pill for?" and I say, "So I don't go nuts again", jokingly, they know it's for my bipolar. It's a completely different story to raise a young child with the belief that the parent is crazy and use that as the only label. That perpetuates the stigma and is just plain wrong. On the other hand, I have my own young children, the youngest being five years and we obviously haven't had that conversation yet as they are just too young to grasp any of it. He has seen me take my meds and said, "You're taking medicine because you're sick?", and I said yes and that was the extent of it. We'll take that one one day at a time...