Care & Feeding: My Son Is Faking Allergies

[minoanmiss]

Allergies are real. I know this! I also know that after watching _Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood_, my son now responds to being offered any food he’s not excited about with a flat, “I’m allergic to [that.] It gives me itchy red bumps on my face!”

Please take my word for it: He isn’t, and it doesn’t. Do you have any idea how awkward it is in public to try to get my son to eat something and have him loudly claim that he is allergic to it and it will give him itchy red bumps? People stare at me! I get irritated notes from play-date hosts about how I should have warned them about his allergies. How should I fix this?

Well, this is indeed a new twist on “I think someone else is making up their allergies,” which is an advice columnist’s bread and butter. Thank you for that.

Let’s go after the low-hanging fruit first: When you drop him off somewhere, calmly tell the host that your kid isn’t allergic to anything (that you know of!) but is currently under the psychological control of Daniel Tiger in this respect, and that unless they see itchy red bumps appearing with their own eyes, he’s fine. It’s not their job to parent your weird kid, so prepping them to say a variant on, “It’s best to just say, ‘No, thank you’ if you don’t want to eat something, Little Billy” is honestly the most you can ask for.

On your own time, I would make sure that your kid is actually allowed to say, “No, thank you” to an individual food and have that respected. If he is, then your kid is just being silly and will eventually move on. (He’ll move on more quickly the less you react, almost universally.) If he isn’t, then he has probably found a decent workaround, and you may need to relax a bit at mealtimes.

I could absolutely take this question more seriously and have you monologue to your kid about crying wolf and how some kids really do have allergies and so on and so forth, but I am really quite confident that you will not have this same problem in two months’ time, and since you do seem more worried about social embarrassment right now, this has “Don’t get worked up about this” written all over it.

Going forward, I suggest switching out _Daniel Tiger_ for a show that will encourage him to cultivate a bit more personal culinary resilience. _Bear Grylls_, perhaps.

Comments

[harpers_child]

You could get your kid tested for allergies. I know my food allergies showed up suddenly and are all to foods I previously ate with no problem. I've acquired more as I get older.

You could have a conversation with your kid about why they don't like that food / those foods. If it's a texture issue or the spice blend is unappealing or whatever, those are things you can change. As someone who can't stand certain textures in their food, it's a bigger impact than you may realize.

[cereta]

I'd add: you can also just let the kid control what he does and doesn't eat. My kid is a super-picky eater, and as much as it sometimes drives me up a wall, I don't see any upsides to "trying to get" her to eat foods she doesn't want to eat. Even my mother, who used to make me eat things that literally made me gag and sit at the table for hours until I ate meatloaf* figured that out eventually.

*Ironically, I figured out later in life that I love meatloaf, just not how my mom makes it (which is bland af). This turns out to be true of a lot of things. Turns out I was not so much a picky eater as I didn't just like my mother's cooking.

[sporky_rat]

To this day I won't eat rice, squash, or lima beans prepared by my parents.

I'll CHEERFULLY eat them at most other places!

[cereta]

I mean, there are still foods I won't eat (lima beans being one of them), and generally speaking, when we visit my mother, when she cooks at all, it's mostly stuff I like. But yeah, my adulthood has been a long discovery that I actually like a lot of stuff, just not the way my mother made it.

[sporky_rat]

Finding out that rice wasn't usually paste, lima beans weren't grainy solid mass, squash wasn't slimy.....life changing.

[movingfinger]

My mother had grown up in the tradition of "cook it till it's safe to eat and 'digestible'," and she considers a green bean that is anything less than shoelace-floppy nearly raw.

[conuly]

You could get your kid tested for allergies. I know my food allergies showed up suddenly and are all to foods I previously ate with no problem. I've acquired more as I get older.

Additionally, it's very common for people to think they "dislike a food", never eat it, and then find out the one time they do eat it that - whoops! - they've got a serious allergy to that food. Which is why they never eat it!

[harpers_child]

Previously fine foods suddenly tasting different in a bad way is the first sign I'm now allergic. For example my cilantro allergy was "this salsa tastes off" and "I think their stock for this pho was going bad".

[conuly]

Oh, a cilantro allergy does not sound enjoyable if you previously liked it.

[melannen]

It doesn't even have to be a serious allergy - as I've gotten older I've realized that a lot of foods I "didn't like" for no reason as a kid actually made my mouth burn or my teeth hurt or made my tummy mildly upset, I'd just internalized that it meant I just "didn't like them" because that's what the grownups said.

I would suggest teaching the kid to say, "I don't want to eat that, it makes me feel bad" instead. Covers a multitude of reasons, harder to ignore but also not minimizing actual anaphylaxis, invites adults to help them articulate real food issues.

[sporky_rat]

It could honestly be the 'ooh attention' thing. I would agree that getting it looked at (and letting people know that as of currently he's not allergic but there will be testing done) isn't a bad idea at all.

Granted, as a Very Smol there were a couple of foods that were considered popular snacks for Smols that I just could not would not with a goat or on a boat eat, Sam-I-Am (raisins, for one. You put a bowl of raisins near me and I will be ill) and the only way I could get people to not give them to me was to say I was allergic. I'm not allergic to them, I have some sort of terrifying gross adversion to them.

Tl;dr, assure local play dates that as far as you know, not allergic to anything; schedule some testing; see if Smol just can't with some foods.

[edenfalling]

My dad is with nuts like you are with raisins -- not allergic, so far as anyone knows, but that's because he literally has a gag reflex when presented anything with nuts (and even nut meal in some cases) so he's never actually eaten enough to check for a reaction.

Our family line is generally, "He can't eat nuts," and just cut off there. Nobody is owed any more explanation than that.

[sporky_rat]

Yeah, it's a tough thing sometimes.

[conuly]

d the only way I could get people to not give them to me was to say I was allergic.

I tell people all the time - the reason people doubt other people's allergies is not because some people lie, it's because people are really weird about food, and consequently, some people have to lie to be taken seriously.

[edenfalling]

I'm inclined to think this is mostly performative, because the kid is explicitly using the allergy line on food he's not excited about. I am sure he has a genuine aversion to those foods, but aversion and allergy are not synonymous.

For example, there are a LOT of foods I am allergic to (as in, my throat swells shut when I eat them, and in the worst cases I can barely breathe) but which I miss like burning because they are delicious. Some of them I will deliberately eat despite my allergies, though of course only accompanied by antihistamines. (You will pry chocolate-covered strawberries, BLTs, and sushi out of my cold, dead hands.)

There are also foods I will not touch with a ten-foot pole that are, so far as I know, completely harmless to me. I just loathe them. These include grape jelly, bologna, store-bought orange juice, and creamed spinach.

The kid is probably reaching for a way to say, "I dislike this and don't want to eat it," that the adults in his life will respect. If you allow him more control over his food choices, the issue will probably resolve itself.

(My parents' take on this was that my brother and I had to eat dinners that contained 1 protein, 1 carbohydrate, and 2 fruit and/or veggie items. Once we were old enough to express preferences, they tried to take those into account. And once we were old enough to be trusted in the kitchen, if we absolutely would not touch an item our mom had prepared, we could go make something else for ourselves, so long as it was from the same category as the thing we refused to eat.)

[starwatcher]

 
Just for fun -- I also don't like grape jelly. (Don't like jelly in general, though a light layer of my homemade prickly pear jelly on bread is delicious.) But, I've discovered that I have orioles hanging around. In an effort to keep them hanging around, I got an oriole feeder -- like a hummingbird feeder, but with bigger holes for drinking. I also read that they like grape jelly, so I got a hanging unit with a cup in it for holding jelly. And they're eating it, about 2 ounces a day. (Which may well go up; I'm told other birds also like it, but apparently they haven't found it yet.)

ANYway, so here I am, buying grape jelly -- the higher-end brands, because it can't contain fructose, which is bad for the birds -- and it's all, literally, going to the birds. But it's such a thrill to see them come, take a few bites, then fly off again. Yes, I get my excitement in small doses.
 

[minoanmiss]

I am glad all over that I posted this, so I could hear about you feeding orioles on grape jelly.

[rosefox]

I wonder how old the LW's kid is. My five-year-old still occasionally tells stories about something that happened to other people or in a book as though it happened to them, like saying "I fell off my bike and scraped my knee" even though they don't own a bike and their knee isn't scraped. It's just part of being too young to fully grasp the parameters of reality.

But I balk at the LW saying "try to get my son to eat something" because if he's old enough to talk, he's old enough to decide what's food for him and what's not. A friend's kid only eats Nutella on bread. (I am not exaggerating. My friend goes around with a loaf of sliced bread and a jar of Nutella in her bag like most parents carry Goldfish crackers or Cheerios.) It's not ideal, but he gets enough calories to live on, and it's a lot less stressful for everyone if his parents roll with it. The LW can roll with her kid being a picky eater and stop trying to get him to eat things he doesn't want to eat.

[conuly]

If your friend's kid only eats one food, and this has been going on more than a few months, I hope somebody has suggested to your friend that an SLP or an occupational therapist may be able to help with that.

[rosefox]

My friend works in health care admin and her kid is getting excellent support and care. :) Thanks for checking.

[conuly]

:)

People can be so weird about food that I feel it's always worth bringing up that therapy is an option for extreme "pickiness", because shockingly, lots of people have no idea.

[julian]

That's interesting. Why would a speech-language pathologist be relevant? (Or, does the initialism stand for something else?)

[conuly]

It's weird, but SLPs also handle feeding issues, because the fields overlap, I guess.