Today we are hosting the freshman baseball team meal. As you can imagine my wife and I have been preparing all weekend to host 14 hungry 15 year old’s for three hours. We purchased all of the supplies, and are ready. Then I go down to the kitchen this morning and find this which we will call exhibit A:
So I grab my glucose normal teenager who swears he only had one. I am lambasting him and telling him he is a big fat liar, when I notice my diabetic teen is unusually quiet and not piling on. Turns out Cody now has the ability to pound chocolate chip cookies and neither my wife nor I noticed anything on Dexcom. Of course to cover his tracks he was more than a little aggressive with his insulin, so he had to eat more than he anticipated. He is now walking to the store to restock our supplies so his teammates have dessert.
Sounds like he’s got it figured out, though! I don’t see any issues here! I hope Liam is as capable when he’s Cody’s age! I honestly won’t care if he eats 1/2 pack of cookies if he’s smart enough with his diabetes to control his BG’s! Kudos to him!
That’s what being “unlimited” is all about. Not caring about what you eat and being armed with the knowledge necessary to control it in such a way that you’re still staying alive and healthy - just like any non-d would be able to do.
Btw, this is great BG management: he should put that to good use in everyday BG control. The need for secrecy may give him great motivation for perfecting his BG control…
That’s an awesome level of skill. You should be proud of his dosing ability, even if you aren’t quite as thrilled by the “pounding cookies” part.
I think I just heard the hat whisper something about Slytherin house. (Slytherin isn’t evil, it’s just a skill set and a certain approach to solving practical problems.)
Why would it matter if you saw it? Shouldn’t he be encouraged to do whatever he needs to and bolus accordingly?
Having parents who regulated things so much (in my case, diet plan, since it was back in the exchange days) that I had to hide what I was doing honestly left with me with some pretty significant psychological damage as a teen that took a long time (and therapy) to undo, and while my control as a teen was good, that all contributed significantly to my later difficulties as a young adult with diabetes control (which in turn, led to my current complications), so if your kid feels the need to “cheat,” it may be a sign that your system needs re-examining and greater room for his own ability to make those decisions.
He is no more limited than my other, glucose normal son. He knows that he can take anything he needs to snack on as long as he doses for it. But when he wants to indulge and splurge (a jar of ice cream, a bunch of cookies) he hides it, like any glucose normal kid would.
But like any other child d or not, there are rules. I don’t want my non d kids to take things out of the cupboards without asking… Things that are clearly foods that we don’t eat all the time like chips and cookies. If we have packs of them in the house it’s because they are for some special occasion. I wouldn’t want any of my kids sneaking around and taking foods that clearly are not normal foods they are allowed to partake in freely without asking.
I do agree with your premise though about encouraging Liam to not have to sneak around when bolusing for foods… But I also want him to understand what “off limits” means.
Now, if we have community cookies or whatever that are always laying around… Heck yes, partake in moderation and bolus through your normal method.
I would get quite concerned if my teenager was hiding food for any reason.
They can eat a jar of peanut butter or a bucket of ice cream in front of me and it doesn’t bother me. If they sneak it into their room then we would sit down and have a serious conversation.
Again - not to mean everybody needs to or should parent the same way. We come from different experiences and are impacted by different events.
I am particularly sensitive to potential eating disorders. And my sensitivity to a potential eating disorder is in no way related to which child does or does not have T1D. With the way we treat T1D, I do not see that as a risk factor (in our household) for an eating disorder. All my children are equal in that respect.
But kids with diabetes aren’t like glucose normal kids in important ways, especially if their care is highly regulated, since everything they do is on the record in a really different from normal way. And I’m not saying it should necessarily be a free for all, but it is a reason to consider when does a kid need more autonomy in their control for precisely that a glucose normal kid would be able to occasionally splurge or whatever without having to think about it much at all, but for a diabetic kid, if doing that becomes a more more intensively secret thing because of the more levels of needing to hide, that’s not without potential psychological consequences. With young kids it is different, but with teens, it’s part of why some amount of privacy seems important or the ability to say, “yes I took a bigger bolus but I don’t want to explain it and it just made sense” also seems like it needs to be fine, especially if it is fact working well.
Eating disorders are way more common in diabetic teens, so @Thomas is right in having it on his radar, and I would suggest all parents of diabetic teens be aware of it.
All my kids have one simple rule in this regard…“If you have to sneak around, you’re probably doing something wrong.”
We were all kids and snuck stuff that we shouldn’t have…doesn’t make it right and doesn’t mean it’s still not a valuable lesson that should be passed along – even if they don’t listen 100% of the time. That’s how I look at it anyway.
I do think the age of the child comes heavily into the picture.
The reality is when the child turns 18 then they are an adult. When a child leaves the house or goes off to college or whatever then they are on their own. Often times this is at 17 or 18 years of age. Less frequently younger or older.
Teenage years are a transition. It is going to happen. It is merely a choice if the transition happens on the day they leave the house for college or apartment or whatever - or if the transition happens more slowly over a period of years as the teen gets older.
My preference is for a slow transition over a period of years while they are still a teenager living in the house with me.
The issue with this is, once kids turn into teens and adults, this “rule” often doesn’t stop them from doing things if they really want to do them, it just means they do feel shame when they end doing them anyway. (And/or they feel a thrill for doing it anyway…) That’s not always going to have terrible consequences, but it can. I can think of any number of therapy clients where that feeling toward their own actions spiraled into a major problem. So again, I agree that you don’t want kids sneaking around, but it’s very important to consider what behaviors are falling into being considered wrong or forced into that potentially. Also I completely agree that it’s very age and development dependent—a restrictive and rules-heavy approach can be fine for a younger child but may cause problems for a teenager who needs to start practicing adulthood.
I hope Liam is as capable when he’s Cody’s age! I honestly won’t care if he eats 1/2 pack of cookies if he’s smart enough with his diabetes to control his BG’s! Kudos to him!
What a great story!
Cody!