Coping With Diabetes Is a Family Affair

When Giuseppina Miller’s 8-year-old son, Peter, was first diagnosed with type 1 diabetes, he necessarily got a lot of his parents’ attention.

“We tried to adjust pretty well, but I was getting no sleep because I had to check his blood sugar in the middle of the night, and I was worried all the time. My two younger daughters felt the stress and ended up getting ignored a little bit,” Miller said.

The young girls — just 7 and 5 at the time — struggled to understand why their brother suddenly garnered so much parental attention, and one day Miller overheard the girls teasing their brother about his diabetes.

“They didn’t really understand, so I thought it might help if they lived a day like he did. I had them eat like