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 adamantly — tell you that they don’t want to go? In this episode, the caller is a program director at a diabetes camp. She tells me that she fields this question all the time from parents who want their kids to go to camp but who are putting up big resistance. I tackle the question and together we think through different kinds of scenarios and different kinds of kids, looking at ways to get our kids involved and ways to hold appropriate limits.

Some highlights:

• Kids don’t know what they don’t know!
• Camp is a privilege: Although many parents grapple with the idea of “forcing" their child to go to camp, it might be helpful to shift thinking to the idea that this is an opportunity for a child, rather than something that parents are making them do.
• A good strategy can be to offer children choices inside the context of the limit you’re setting.
• Attending a family camp can be an excellent way to get past our kids’ resistance.
• Ultimately, we may be pleasantly surprised about whether camp works or doesn’t work for our child.

Stay tuned for our next episode of the Sweet Talk podcast! Like, subscribe, and share!

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Need help getting your kid the right snacks?

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