It’s Like an Educated Guessing Game: Parents’ Strategies for Collaborative Diabetes Management with Their Children

Children with Type 1 Diabetes (T1D) face many challenges with keeping their blood glucose levels within a healthy range because they cannot manage their illness by themselves. To prevent children’s blood glucose from becoming too high or too low, parents apply different strategies to avoid risky situations. To understand how parents of children with T1D manage these risks, we conducted semi-structured interviews with children with T1D (ages 6-12) and their parents (N=41). We identified four types of strategies used by parents (i.e., educated guessing game, contingency planning, experimentation, and reaching out for help) that can be categorized according to two dimensions: 1) the cause of risk (known or unknown) and 2) the occurrence of risk (predictable or unpredictable). Based on our findings, we provide design implications for collaborative health technologies that support parents in better planning for contingencies and identifying unknown causes of risks together with their children.