Please don’t let your children eat common allergens while playing on public playground equipment
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Anonymous
| You can also get sick from smelling peanuts clown |
Anonymous
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This sees common sense to me, and not even from an allergy standpoint, but from a good hygiene, choking, and civilized person/manners standpoint.
Kids shouldn’t be eating snacks while simultaneously running, climbing and on playground equipment. Touching dirty playground equipment while eating and running/jumping/climbing while chewing and swallowing are both not good. I rarely bring good to the playground, but if I do, they sit down on the bench or picnic table (or grass), clean their hands, eat their snack, clean hands again, then go back to playing. |
Anonymous
Why can’t they have a little bit of their friends snack? |
Anonymous
NP but before I got into DCUM I used to read Berkeley Parents Network all the time. Is there a reason why I shouldn’t have? |
Anonymous
| I think op should not bring her kid to public park. |
Anonymous
This is the answer after 30 pages |
Anonymous
I know this is off topic, but: yes. Also, both my kid and I are naturally tall and thin and I get insane judgment about food/feeding because people assume I diet/exercise obsessively to maintain my weight (I don’t) so if there is ever any implication that I might be denying my kid food, a surprising number of people assume I have an eating disorder and I’m trying to give DD one too. Like once I forgot a snack for the playground and got an actual lecture from another mom about feeding my kid. She definitely thought I had food issues and dud not believe me when I said I forgot. At one point she tried to order me to go to a nearby grocery store (“I will watch your kid. You need to go get her FOOD.”). Just deranged. We left the playground but now I’m aware of the optics and I’m never without extra food. |
Anonymous
This is the correct way to deal with your child's allergies. |
Anonymous
Not the PP but how is this an “excuse”? It’s one thing to say “I’ll refuse to move to a different spot with my child’s lunch when you ask me”, it’s another to be like “on top of everything else I’m worrying about, I’m not going to filter my non allergic kids lunch for the top 8 allergens every time we leave the house”. |
Anonymous
I mean, reading is one thing, but commenting on it as if you’re a Berkeley parent and making generalizations about “parents around here” when YOU are not even from around there is bizarre |
Anonymous
Had to add the bolded. It isn't just that people may not avoid those foods on purpose, they are also not educated enough to properly avoid them if they tried. Again, no one knows how serious your child's allergies are. Is it just peanuts/peanut butter? Cross-contamination? Contact? Etc. The OP is being deaf and blind to other risk factors at the expense of yelling at people because of what she can see happening. Its what you cant see and cant mitigate that is the risk. |
Anonymous
Or do it as part of a proper exposure treatment. That kid is going to leave the bubble at some point. Even travel to ohmygosh some foreign country? |
Anonymous
| My oldest went to school with a child with a deadly nut allergy. She died after secondary exposure at school. Our youngest never ate anything with nut products in public. It isn't hard to do. |
Anonymous
So here's the thing - as a parent without food allergies with kids who don't have food allergies, other people's allergies aren't at the forefront of my mind at all times. I do know that when it comes time for birthday treats at school I always need to check with the teachers to confirm any allergies or even intolerances to make sure all kids can enjoy something, but honestly, if we stopped at a playground for an unplanned activity, I'm not confident that making sure my kids hadn't been eating any nut or allergen-containing food would be something that would occur to me at the moment every single time. So I think it's really unfair (and unhelpful) to call people selfish or odd for doing something that YOU think about all the time but that isn't something they are that closely attuned to. Honestly, I bet you say or do things that other people find offensive (although surely you'll argue with me on this point...). I'll say that if giving up peanut butter forever meant that no child would ever have an allergic reaction and die or almost die again, I would totally do it. But that won't happen because other people will keep eating peanut butter, and there are tons of other allergens, so while I'm willing to be careful and not send things to school that I know would be a problem, I'm not intending to ban all potential allergens from my house forever, which means that my kids are going to eat things that someone is allergic to at some point and while I can make them wash their hands and not let them eat while playing on equipment, that doesn't mean they'll never have a trace of peanut butter on their leg before going down the slide (I mean, have you ever seen a little kid eat?!). OP could have phrased her post (or, far more helpful, her in-person interaction, since posting on the internet does nothing but cause people to fight) as a gentle PSA to people. The title of her post sort of sounded like that's what this would be...and then it wasn't. I think this is an area where helpful and kind reminders that don't sound judgmental and one-sided would be useful, such as signs at playgrounds (which people have suggest OP lobby for). I know there are some real jerks out there, but I think most people aren't being intentionally thoughtless - they're just not used to dealing with an allergy issue so it doesn't occur to them to think about it all the time. So rather than going off on people and yelling at them for doing something with malintent, perhaps better education in a nice and informative manner would be the better way to handle this. Because I have to say, reading almost 20 pages of this post hasn't made me particularly more sensitive to parents with kids who have allergies than I already was. If anything, it's made me more inclined to get really mad if they do snatch a snack out of my kid's hand because it's made me realize there are many, many more effective methods of getting this information out. |
Anonymous
https://www.dcurbanmom.com/weblog/2023/02/21/update022123 The most active thread yesterday was titled, "Please don’t let your children eat common allergens while playing on public playground equipment" and posted in the "General Parenting Discussion" forum. As the title says, the original poster urges parents to not allow their children to eat foods to which many children are allergic on public playground equipment. Because of the severity of the original poster's child's allergies, this practice essentially makes it impossible for the child to go to playgrounds. This thread is 15 pages long and I only have time to read the first couple of pages. But, that is enough to know that there is a huge fight between parents who consider eating peanuts while climbing on the monkey bars to be a God-given right that will not be infringed and those who are not above physically assaulting someone in order to confiscate their snacks. Beyond that, rather than summarize the thread more accurately, I want to comment on two aspects of the responses that stuck out to me. The first is a topic that I may have brought up before in one of these posts, so forgive me if I am repeating myself. That is the importance of the first response. It has been a longtime observation of mine that the first response is often essential in setting the tone of the thread. In this case, the actual first response was the original poster adding more detail to the initial post. But, the next response was from a poster who essentially ignored the original poster's concerns and asked what she would do when the child goes to school or college, obviously unaware that accommodations for children with allergies are common in both. This poster continued opposing even the most mild of sacrifices and made clear that she wasn't interested in anyone's issues but her own. I think this clearly established the tone of the thread right from the start. The second thing that stood out to me involves the same poster. Admittedly, DCUM can be a pretty rough place at times with posters often being unnecessarily harsh. Frequently, this is blamed on the region's culture with residents of the DC-area being described as unkind or overly competitive. The original poster was even guilty of this, alluding to "dog eat dog D.C.". But, the poster responsible for the negative posts and who adamantly insisted nobody mattered but her was not posting from the DC area and appears to be a couple of states away. In my experience, actual DC people are more than willing to make reasonable accommodations for children with allergies and I would hate for this thread to give the opposite impression based mostly on the unrepresentative posts of someone from outside the area. |