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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.