Will My Baby Get Diabetes?
Reviewed by CDE Mehandi Sharma · Updated
This is the question almost every woman with GDM asks, and it deserves a straight answer rather than reassurance.
Your baby is not born with diabetes. GDM does not give a baby diabetes.
What is true is that children born after a GDM pregnancy carry a somewhat higher long-term risk of Type 2 diabetes and of carrying excess weight than children who were not. It is a raised risk over decades, not a condition present at birth.
It is also worth separating the strands. Some of that risk is genetic, and it is the same family predisposition that contributed to your GDM in the first place. Some of it relates to the environment in the womb. And a great deal of it relates to how the household eats and moves as the child grows up — which is the part you can influence.
That last point is the useful one. The changes you made during your pregnancy are the same changes that reduce your child's risk: meals with more vegetables and protein, less reliance on refined carbohydrate, and being active as a family. A household that keeps them is doing something durable for the child.
Two things not to do. Do not put a child on a restricted diet out of fear — that needs professional guidance. And do not carry this as guilt: you did not choose your genes or your placental hormones.