What you give your kid can kill hers.
If a mom tells you her kid has a severe allergy, be decent and understanding. Don’t be a douche.
I don’t care what you feed your kids. OK, I do, but I’m not going to preach to you about it.
I don’t care if you breast feed or bottle feed or family bed or cry it out. How you screw up your kids is your own damn business. That’s how I feel about most things.
Except when your kids are little beasts because they haven’t been taught decent manners or respect. When they snicker at the slower kids, throw things at cats, and shatter glass bottles where the little ones will play in the morning. Because then they turn into big beasts who are rude to all and sundry, are dangerous on the roads since their time is so much more important than everyone else’s, and are generally the type of human beings that make God want to pull the plug on this whole damn thing.
But most of you are really good parents and try really hard. So, I’m going to say this:
If your friend, or even not a friend, just a parent at the park, says that their child has severe food allergies — peanuts or milk or what have you — and your child is eating that food and smearing it on the playground slide or handing out that potential lethal substance to kids at random, stop him!
A food allergy is not a food sensitivity.
It’s not diarrhea she’s facing — it’s anaphylactic shock.
It’s not a rash, it’s a closed throat.
If someone says that their child is deathly allergic to something — don’t be a douche and talk about your IBS. Don’t wax poetic about your lactose intolerance or gluten sensitivity.
The two are incomparable.
Understand this: if a child has a serious food allergy, that mother suffers. She must be on guard. At. All. Times.
She must separate her child from other children, carry an EpiPen wherever she goes, read labels obsessively, bring her own food all of the time because she knows that most of the food served can send her kid to the hospital, and argue with every idiot that tells her why its really not a big deal.
Just try to be a bit sympathetic- or at least seek to prevent a potential disaster, and keep the things that can kill her kid away — just pretend its Clorox near your 2 year old- or if you’re that type, a GMO based food.
If a child in your kid’s school has an allergy, send your kids with an alternative food — there’s allota choice out there, people. Trust me, I’ve seen the Triscuit aisle.
Be decent and understanding. Don’t be a douche.
People die from food allergies. Really. Look it up.
A little sensitivity won’t cost you much, and it will mean worlds to her. It could even save her kid’s life.
