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Diabetes Blood Glucose Control for Children

If your child has diabetes, it's necessary to control her blood glucose. Accurate glucose monitors, records and meal plans can make controlling blood glucose much easier. Making sure that your child takes an active role in controlling her blood glucose is important, so share this information with her if she's old enough to act on it.

  1. Accurate Checking of Blood Glucose

    • Ensuring that your child's glucose meter is accurate will go a long way toward helping your child control his glucose levels. Even if you've been checking your child's blood glucose for years, there's still a possibility that you're doing something incorrectly. To ensure that you're checking your child's blood glucose accurately, periodically ask a diabetes counselor to watch you go through the process and correct any problems with your technique.

      You should also make sure to check the calibration of your meter periodically. To do this, ask your doctor if you can come in and check your child's blood glucose twice. One drop of blood will be placed in the meter, and the other will be sent to a lab for testing (or tested on your doctor's equipment). If the results differ by more than 20 percent and your checking techniques are in order, you'll have to buy a new meter that is calibrated correctly.

    Keeping and Using Records of Blood Glucose

    • It is important to keep accurate records of your child's blood glucose levels in order to control them. Although your glucose meter will usually store your child's blood glucose levels, it will not include all information about materials that could affect your child's blood glucose. Depending on your child's age, you may want to keep the records yourself or give the responsibility to her. Make a chart that includes space for the date, time, food eaten recently, dose of insulin taken recently, exercise done recently and blood glucose results. Use this record to identify trends, such as a change in glucose after eating a certain food, doing a certain activity or taking a dose of insulin. Discuss your observations with your doctor.

    Developing a Meal Plan

    • Based on your child's glucose reading, you can create a meal plan together with your doctor that works. There are several meal plans you can choose from, including an exchange meal plan, a constant carbohydrate meal plan and a carbohydrate counting meal plan. If you choose to use an exchange meal plan, your doctor will provide your child with a schedule of servings per food group that your child should eat. Your child can eat any foods, provided that they fall into the appropriate food groups. The other two meal plans require your child to estimate the number of grams of carbohydrate that she has eaten. If your doctor suggests a constant carbohydrate meal plan, your child will eat a specified amount of carbohydrates each day, scheduled according to meals. If your doctor suggests a carbohydrate counting plan, your child will change the amount of any insulin injection based on the amount of carbs she is eating for that meal.

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