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There are so many angles to come at this from: how and why is it important to make room for things like cookies and candy in your child's life even though they live with diabetes?

Yes, you heard me: make room for things like cookies and candy!

You see, I've worked with people of all ages and all different backgrounds. I've worked with people who were diagnosed when they were 3 years old, 14 years old, and 28 years old.

The one thing that almost everyone has in common is the baggage they carry with them around food. And sure, this happens whether or not you have diabetes-you might notice that you've tried to cut things out of your own diet entirely just to find yourself wanting that food even more. Your child will learn that habit from you! But in a life with diabetes it is so easy for food to become the enemy, the "I can't have it so I want it even more" object of obsession, and food becomes the number one thing that makes diabetes the hardest.

As a parent, you might feel obligated to tell your child they can't have candy, cookies, ice cream and birthday cake at parties. They can't enjoy Valentine's day treats at school, or Halloween, or Christmas cookies...but when you step back and look at how that is going to shape the thoughts in their head about food, what's the bigger picture?

I know your goal is to help them manage their blood sugars more effectively, but when you dose for it properly, insulin is there for the occasional cookie or lollipop. Eating potatoes, even sweet potatoes, impacts my blood sugar just as severely as a handful of Sour Patch Kids. A bowl of whole-wheat pasta can send my blood sugar just as high as a bowl of ice cream if I don't take enough insulin to cover it all. The answer, I believe, is not to cut out the treats, but to include them in a way that teaches your kids a variety of things:

1. They get to choose what they eat, and those choices will impact them in different ways. You can choose to eat ice cream all day, which will eventually lead you to feeling pretty sick, or you can choose to eat healthy foods for most of the day, and you'll notice how much better you feel. It's hard to trust that process, but children are capable of appreciating healthy food.

                                                                                                           

Children are also capable of becoming resentful of something because they've been told their whole life they can't ever have it. Having the power to choose not to eat something is much different than being told you cannot ever have something.

2. Moderation! This has been drilled into our society so much now that we forget what it really means. Moderation doesn't mean setting strict limits and cutting things out entirely. Moderation implies that we will enjoy something to a reasonable point. Two cookies instead of ten. One cup of ice cream instead of three. But if your whole life you've been told you can't have any of those cookies, it is almost inevitable that when you finally do get your hands on them, you're going to want much more than you need.


3.  Learning to accept our responsibilities! When you allow your child to choose what they eat, and choose how much they're going to eat, you help them come to a point in their diabetes management where they have to accept that certain choices will make diabetes easier or harder. If we force someone to make a decision without actually letting them make it themselves, the appreciation for what that decision will do for them essentially disappears. Can you let your child come to a point in their life with diabetes where they can say, "I know that eating cookies all night is going to really mess up my blood sugar...so I'm jut going to have three,"?


Food plays all kinds of not-so-funny games in our heads. I can tell you that telling your child they cannot eat sweets or have fun at birthday parties is going to do more harm than good, and it will impact their thoughts for years to come if you don't help them to develop a healthier relationship with food.

Instead, what can you do? How can you include treats in your child's life in a way that won't leave them feeling deprived, resentful, and left out? How can you help your child develop a really healthy relationship with all kinds of food, not just the healthy food?