What are some of the challenges around Halloween for children with type 1 diabetes? And do children have to avoid candy and sweets and give away their treats?

So with children with type 1 diabetes, one of the things that I try to emphasize in general with their care is trying to not make them feel different.

And so I think it's still good to make sure that they have the experiences that we have in our normal childhood, going trick-or-treating, having that candy on Halloween night.

But knowing that we have to kind of monitor that candy intake because we are going to have to cover it with our insulin, making sure that we aren't just kind of really eating anything because it can cause those huge blood sugar spikes that may take a really long time to treat and come down.

And then as far as kind of the candy afterwards.

I talked to a few of my families that actually have kiddos with type 1, and it seemed like there's kind of two schools of thought.

A lot of them do the game where they call the switch switch, where they switch out that candy for prizes and things like that to try to just get it out of the house.

Are there some common mistakes that parents of children with type 1 diabetes might make when trying to restrict Halloween candy? And what about children with prediabetes? Should children restrict their treats?