Sweet Talk for Parents of Kids with Type One Diabetes

As T1D parents, most — if not all — of us grapple with some pretty significant anxiety about keeping our kids safe. The parent on the show this week shares with us about how she’s fighting with that anxiety in the quest to get things right with diabetes.  Frankly, the parent has one of the hardest diabetes scenarios:  Her daughter, now four, was diagnosed at 13 months.  It’s extra s...

This week a mom came on the show to talk about her son who was diagnosed a little less than a month ago — but, amazingly, she didn’t have a question about him!  Instead, she wanted to think about her 5-year-old non-T1D daughter who had come to her, saying that she feels “left out” of the family since the diagnosis. I am so impressed that this mom not only had the bandwidth to think about her...

This week, a mom joins me in a wide-ranging conversation about the way her son can get sassy — and be difficult to parent — when his blood sugar is high.  But before we ever got to that issue, we hit on a few other important topics. First of all, this brave mom talked about how dysregulated she gets when she is following diabetes all, all, all the time.  She shared that she’s made a prac...

This week, I’m talking to a mom with an all-too-familiar problem:  Her teenager, diagnosed for years now and a conscientious diabetes manager until recently, has basically given up on bolusing.  Mom is at her wit’s end, trying to figure out how to help her daughter pick this habit back up.  She’s tried lots of strategies: motivational talk, discussion of best health practices, and e...

This week, I talked with a mom whose T1D son recently left for college. It’s clear that mom trusts her son – and that they have a good relationship – but she’s also nervous about him being on his own.  A lovely priority for her is to make sure that he knows that she’s there for him. We discuss how important it is for her to take a step back and make room for his voice.  The operating que...

For today’s episode, a mom came on to share how her 9-year-old son has become increasingly and newly worried anytime his CGM shows a high reading. We were able to trace this new anxiety to one particularly traumatic experience when he was over 400 for several hours and his parents (and grandparents) weren’t sure why he was high and were pretty anxious themselves.  Together, mom and I understo...

I’m so lucky this week to have Kaylor Glassman on the show. I know Kaylor through DYF, the organization that runs a diabetes camp in Northern California; she used to be the program director there. Now she has a business called Diabetes Support Partners, which is specifically designed to help families with a newly diagnosed child.  The question we’re tackling is about T1D siblings and about ho...

What a dilemma!  To stay or to go?  In this episode, I talked to a lovely mother who is debating whether she should move to live near her family who she knows can and will support her and her newly diagnosed daughter.  The sticking point is that she also loves her job, feeling like she won the “career lottery” – and she isn’t sure she wants to give that up.  Since her daughter...

This week, I had a wonderful conversation with my old T1D mom friend, Tamar.  Tamar and I met at camp a million years ago and our children were diagnosed on the same day!  She’s a veteran, so you’ll hear a robust conversation about the question. A parent wrote in, saying that her son wants to eat “normally.”  Together, Tamar and I think about both how that’s possible — and why it’s...

What a complex issue!  This week, a mom came on the show, talking about how her somewhat-newly diagnosed 7-year-old has been pulling off her pump.  Mom has been working hard to stay calm in the face of all these pump “failures” but really wants to get at the root of the problem, so her daughter stops derailing her own treatment.  She’s thinking about the kinds of consequences she mi...

I had an interesting conversation this week with a mom of a T1D pre-schooler.  Because she’s managed to keep dosing pretty invisible and seamless for him thanks to tech, she’s worrying that he doesn’t understand that he needs insulin to eat. As we explored the issues of how she could introduce the idea to him about this, we also were able to better understand her very normal worries about wha...

Sure, we want our kids to like their low supplies — after all, they sometimes need to eat them when they don’t want to eat a thing.  But we don’t want them to like them so much that they eat them for fun. That would equal a blood sugar disaster.  In this episode, T1D mom Julie comes to talk about just that:  Her four-year-old was high for several days in a row and she had no idea wh...

Diabetes anniversaries!  If you go onto Facebook, you’ll see a lot of photos of kids with cakes celebrating this milestone.  But not everyone wants to take that on.  In fact, some people just feel like diabetes is a bummer, and not something they want to celebrate in any way.  In this episode, fellow T1D mom Annie and I discuss a question from a listener who wrote asking whethe...

With diabetes, there’s the independence dance:  Sometimes our kids want to learn and grow into new tasks and responsibilities with their own self-care — and sometimes they’d rather hand it back to us.  What makes this particularly hard is the chatter in our own heads.  We parents worry when our kids take a step backward, thinking that we need to hold the line to ensure that our kids...

We all remember what it was like when our T1D child was first diagnosed: The shock and sadness — and the steep, steep learning curve to trying to get diabetes “right.”  As we watched each reading and each bite of food, we worried about being away from our child, and we wanted that CGM as quickly as possible.   In this episode, the mom of a newly diagnosed 8-year-old girl comes to ta...

Another listener wrote in with a question about drug use for their T1D kid so I asked Dr. Justin Altschuler, a T1D and addiction doc, back onto the show to provide answers.  In this episode, we tackle issues that come up around experimenting with “harder” drugs, like cocaine, hallucinogens, and opiates. Dr. Justin leans into his experience as a substance doctor to explain what he knows about...

Getting help and feeling misunderstood: the bane of a T1D parent’s existence.  But what happens when we feel misunderstood by the people who are supposed to be closest to us, like our own family? Because I’ve heard these challenges from so many parents, I took this question from a listener who’s struggling with family misunderstanding about their child’s T1D.  It’s feeling so bad that th...

This episode surprised me — it’s the first time I’ve had a couple come on the show together to help them navigate the stress and challenges that come up because they have a type 1 child.  It’s like a sneak-peak into a couples therapy session.  In Colleen and Wesley’s case, their disagreement centers around food and eating. Since we know that diabetes can make for more difficulties in our...

One of the ways so many of us manage our nighttime anxiety after our kids’ initial diagnosis is by pulling them into bed with us.  We have a magical belief that we will keep them safer if they are right next to us as they sleep.  And while that’s a reasonable strategy for a time — until we can get our own anxiety and shock under control — it’s not an answer for the long term.  In th...

Parents know that mixing alcohol and type 1 brings extra challenges. Although we’ve tackled this topic before, Dr. Justin Altschuler is back to answer more listener questions about how to navigate the tricky territory of drinking with T1D. And just as a reminder: Not only does Dr. Justin have a private practice that specializes in addiction and T1D, but he serves as the medical director of Diabete...

Sending our T1D kids to school can be hard, but we know we have to find a way — after all, they need to be there and we know that the school needs to help us make that happen.  It can feel really different, though, when we need to lean into our community to ask friends to take care of our type 1 kiddos for something like a sleepover.  Sure, our kids deserve that social interaction, but h...

Camp!  If you’ve come to almost any event I’ve hosted or been part of, you know that I’m a big proponent of diabetes camp.  There are so many good reasons for this but the biggest is that our kids benefit from being in a community with other people who also have diabetes.  So what to do when you tell your T1D child that you’re planning to send them to camp and they — firmly and adam...

We all know that how we experience our kid’s type 1 is very different from how the rest of the world sees us.  People on the outside might see us calmly dosing for a meal or picking up prescriptions at the pharmacy.  They have no idea that we’re up nights, checking the Dexcom through the day, or on the phone with insurance for hours on end. That said, sometimes people on the outside migh...

Another mother coming on the show, concerned because she’s finding food wrappers and feels like her child is “ sneaking food ”?  Yes! But food and eating is such an important topic that I wanted to let you listen to lots of different ways you can think about and approach the issues if (and when) they come up with your T1D child.     In this episode, we meet a mom who has s...

It’s so hard to stay level when you’re parenting – and adding type 1 to the mix can really turn up the temperature on feeling out of control.  In this week’s podcast, Annie and I talk together about a question from “Feeling out of control in Albuquerque” who is struggling with the anger that can sweep over her when something goes sideways with diabetes.   Annie and I both relate to...