Background: Since parental involvement is essential to the outcome of diabetes type 1 treatment in childhood and high paternal engagement in everyday life promote the child's health, it is of value to explore how professionals, the diabetes teams (DT), perceive fathers' involvement in their child with diabetes type 1.

Method: The study design was Constructivist Grounded Theory and data was collected by Repeated Focus Groups discussions with three Swedish pediatric diabetes teams, between May 2010 and January 2011.

Results: The core category for the diabetes teams' perception of fathers' involvement was If dad comes, we are happy – if mom fails to appear, we become desperate. The core category relied on three subcategories. Societal and cultural context where DTs perceived fathers involvement as having specific properties and specific areas of responsibility, Balancing where the DTs balanced the father's involvement against the mother's engagement and Becoming aware where the DTs raised awareness of the fathers from being a indistinct parents-unit till to identify and appreciate the father's engagement.

Conclusions: Perceiving fathers as equal caregivers, and becoming aware of fathers as a health resource, could support an active health promotion perspective in pediatric diabetes care.