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

[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.