48: When Your Kid Panics About Going High

Sweet Talk for Parents of Kids with Type One Diabetes

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 understood that this kiddo probably picked up on the high energy of that one day which put him in an elevated state of alarm when he’s heading up. Through our conversation, we explored ways to help him lower his worry and ways to talk to him about it.

Listen to the episode to hear more about:

• Making a protocol for when there’s a high so everyone knows what to do and we reduce the crisis response
• Offering tools to slow down anxiety, primarily through modeling and talking about the challenges
• Times and ways to validate our children’s experience, even as we want them to shift their perspective
• Talking through what might happen – including the idea of going to the hospital – to demystify a child’s fear of what that might mean
• Owning up to the ways that our reactions as adults might have impacted our kids.

Mentioned in this episode:

Need help getting your kid the right snacks?

That's why I've created the Sweet Talk Snack Course. It's a free mini-course to give you 6 snack sized lessons on making sure you're giving your kid the right foods to keep them nourished and their blood sugar in check. Get it at https://diabetessweettalk.com