Managing Diabetes As A Family

To Eat Or Not To Eat

Having a child with T1D brings a lot of change not only for the child but really for the whole family.  Managing diabetes as a family effects what we eat, where we eat, and when we eat.  One of the things that really bothers our child is that she can’t eat what she wants whenever she wants and when she does get something she really likes she has to have a lesser portion than everyone else.  It’s a struggle that I am sure most families have.

I think it is so important that everyone in the family be a part of managing  diabetes care because it can effect the health of your diabetic child.  We are their support group and we need to help them by considering their health before our wants.  This really came to light for us a few weeks ago when we celebrated by wife’s birthday.  We always make a cake for birthdays and so we did the same thing we always did.  We figured out that the cake our daughter could have was to be about 2.5oz so I cut it and weighed it and it was not a very big piece.  Of course our daughter was disappointed because it wasn’t as large of a piece as she used to get.  My wife did something without saying anything and cut all of our pieces about the same size.   My first thought was “hey I want a bigger piece” but I quickly realized that my wife was trying to show our daughter that we are in this with you.

There are also certain foods that make our daughter’s sugar spike.  We’ve decided as a family that as much as we may like these foods, it’s not worth the damage it will cause our daughter if she eats it.  The difficult part of this decision is that we have another child and want to consider their feelings in this as well.  Is it fair that they may not get to eat something they enjoy because their sister has diabetes?  Well, this is where I believe diabetes is a family disease.  I recently spoke with another family who has a child with T1D.  Their child is older and has had diabetes for several years now.  In talking with the wife, she said she wished they had treated diabetes as a family.  I think what she was saying is that they viewed diabetes as their child’s problem.  Of course they do everything they can to help their child but they didn’t view it as a disease that should effect everyone in the family and they felt regret about that.

So, is it fair for my other child?  Well the question my wife posed to me really helped me with this. She asked, “What is more important, eating certain foods or keeping our daughter healthy.”  Don’t get me wrong, I wasn’t trying to argue that I want certain food and my daughter is just going to have to deal with it, but I guess, as a family, we just hadn’t thought about this yet.  Obviously I want my daughter to be as healthy as she can be and I would do anything to make that so.

Life isn’t fair! This is a good lesson for everyone to learn.  For some reason in our society today everything is supposed to be fair but the truth is life isn’t fair.  So rather than worry about what is fair, we want to consider what is healthy.