Eighteen Years of Food Allergy Parenting
This September marks two milestones that arrive closely together: my last K-12 back to school and my younger daughter turning 18. This is the year she is applying to colleges and we are preparing for her to live more independently. We are not there yet, but can see it from here. Here are some reflections from this vantage point, looking back at eighteen years of navigating this food allergy journey alongside her.
In the Beginning, I Didn't Know What I Was Doing
Nobody does, of course. But food allergy parenting in the early years carries a specific kind of uncertainty that goes beyond the ordinary disorientation of new parenthood. We were given conflicting definitions of anaphylaxis by different providers. I hesitated to administer epinephrine when I should have. I was waiting for a level of certainty that the situation was never going to give me and in that hesitation, I learned something that would take years to fully integrate: to act on what you see, not on what you're sure of.
As a young child, my daughter did not have the language to tell me what was happening in her body. I had to learn to read her: the face flush, the eyes sinking into her head, the behavior change, the way she went quiet in a particular way that was different from tired or hungry or scared. I learned to trust the signals of a body that couldn't yet speak for itself. And that trust extended to something I hadn't anticipated: learning to believe her aversions. When she pushed a food away, turned her face, seemed instinctively resistant to something, I learned not to push. Not to cajole or encourage or try one more time. Her older sister and I had done all of that, the ordinary parenting around food, the gentle encouragement to try something new, celebrating a clean plate. None of that worked the second time around. With my youngest, her body was already communicating something long before she had words for it. My work was learning to listen. That early lesson, trust what you observe, believe your child's signals, act before you're certain, turned out to be one of the most important things food allergy parenting ever taught me.
Learning to Trust Myself
The conflicting information from providers was one thing. But there was something harder: the doctors who minimized, who were dismissive, who sent me home with my concerns unaddressed and my instincts quietly undermined. I know now that this is common. That food allergy parents, and mothers in particular, are sometimes not taken seriously, told they're overreacting, reassured in ways that are meant to end the conversation rather than address it. At the time, I just felt the self-doubt and the disquiet of knowing deep in my body that something was wrong and we were not getting the answers we needed.
Learning to trust and act on my intuition intersected with something personal: I am someone who has spent a lifetime people pleasing, who found it difficult to advocate loudly for my own needs, and who was more comfortable accommodating than pushing back. Her allergies changed that. Not immediately, and not without effort. But advocating for her reached something in me that advocating for myself never quite had. I learned to be the person in the room who asked the hard questions, calmly pushed back on the dismissal, and insisted on being taken seriously, because she needed me to be that. She taught me a form of self-assertion I had not managed to find on my own behalf.
The Limits of Control
Over her 18 years, my daughter has been allergic to twenty-nine different foods. She has eczema, asthma, environmental allergies, cold-induced anaphylaxis, and solar urticaria. When she was little, the whole world felt like one large, poorly labeled risk and all I wanted to do was bubble-wrap her and keep her home safe with me.
What I came to accept, slowly, reluctantly, and then with something approaching peace, is that control was never really available. Not in the way I wanted it. The list of allergens was too long, the world too unpredictable, the variables too numerous. What was available was preparation. Research. Developing rules and protocols. Knowing what to do when something went wrong. Trusting the plan we had built rather than the illusion that the plan would prevent anything from ever going wrong.
That shift, from control to preparation, from seeking the illusion of certainty to trusting my capacity for responsiveness, was one of the most significant psychological moves of my parenting life. And I didn't make it all at once. I made it incrementally, over years, as reality kept showing me that a tight grip wasn't making anyone safer. It was just making me more exhausted and our lives more restricted.
The Performance of Calm
There is something food allergy parents learn to do that almost no one talks about. We learn to appear relaxed. At the birthday party, at the restaurant, at the playdate. We are running risk scenarios in our heads, tracking what's on the table, calculating proximity and cross-contact and exit routes, while simultaneously smiling and making conversation and appearing to be people who are simply enjoying the afternoon. We do this deliberately, and we do it for our children, because the fear is ours to carry. Because a child who grows up watching their parent scan every room for danger learns to scan every room for danger. Because we understand, instinctively or eventually, that our children are highly attuned to our nervous system. They absorb our threat state and our sense of calm steadiness.
That performance is a form of skilled, sustained, largely invisible labor. And it is something I am thankful I learned to do. Not because the fear wasn't real, but because she deserved a childhood that wasn't entirely shaped by it. Part of what made that possible, the lightness alongside the vigilance, was humor. Not humor for other people's comfort, but humor for us. Inside jokes that only we understood. A way of naming the hard thing and laughing at it gently, without mocking it or minimizing it or pretending it wasn't real. I cultivated that deliberately, finding a version of levity that brought us closer rather than creating distance, that reframed without dismissing, that reaffirmed that we are still okay. Our humor became its own form of resilience.
The Treatment Years
We did SLIT, OIT, allergy shots, biologics. Each treatment came with its own arc of hope, effort, adjustment, and recalibration. None of it was simple; all of it was worth doing. What I remember most about those years is not the protocols or the outcomes but the emotional texture of them. The hope that something might shift, the exhaustion of the process, the way each round required us to adjust what we thought we knew and start building a new map. And alongside all of it, life continued. New schools, new friends, a new home. We went to weddings and funerals. We traveled internationally. We navigated a pandemic. We had ordinary days and difficult holidays and everything in between.
I made a choice early on, and renewed it many times, that allergies would not be her or our ceiling as a family. That we would live as fully as possible within real constraints, and that those constraints would be negotiated honestly rather than avoided, denied, or lamented. That is radical acceptance, not giving up but finding peace with what is true in the present moment, so that energy can go toward living rather than fighting a reality than is different than what I had hoped for or wanted for us.
What It Built in Her
Here is some of what eighteen years of food allergy life cultivated in my daughter, as best as I can name from where I stand now.
A relationship with her own body that most people her age don't have. She pays attention to what she eats, how she feels, what her body is telling her. She trusts her physical signals in a way that took me decades to develop and she arrived at through necessity.
Self-advocacy that is quiet and competent. She knows how to ask for what she needs in a restaurant, at a friend's house, in a situation where the stakes are real and the other person may not understand them. She does it without apology and without drama. Along with that advocacy came something related, the ability to set boundaries clearly and hold them with confidence. To know her own needs and communicate them without shrinking. I worked hard to model that but she has made it her own.
Empathy rooted in lived experience rather than imagination. Having spent her whole life needing others to accommodate her, she understands what it means to feel different, to require something others don't, to hope that people will take your needs seriously. That tends to produce people who actually see others.
A maturity around risk that is genuinely unusual. She has been making decisions and considering consequences since she was old enough to understand what anaphylaxis means. That kind of responsibility, taken seriously over a long time, builds something. She has developed emotion regulation skills for managing fear, disappointment, and frustration around food and social situations from a young age, in contexts where falling apart wasn't always an option.
And the harder side too. Learning when you're overinterpreting signals. Knowing the difference between a true warning and noise. Understanding when to push through something and when to stop. These are not easy calibrations, but she has been making them her whole life.
The Rhythm Nobody Told Me About
If I could go back and tell my younger self one thing, it would be this: it gets easier. And then it gets hard again. And then easier. And then hard in a completely new way you didn't anticipate because everything has changed and you have to start learning again.
This is true of all parenting, I think. But food allergies add a specific layer to it because the stakes of each transition are higher, the recalibration required is more technical, and the emotional weight of each new chapter is carried by both of you in ways that are hard to fully articulate. There were periods that felt impossible. And then they settled into a rhythm. And then something changed -- a new treatment, a new school, a pandemic, adolescence -- and the rhythm broke and we found a new one. Over and over. That cycle is not a sign that something is wrong, it is the cadence of development and parenting with food allergies.
From Protector to Consultant
Somewhere in the middle years, not without effort, and not without fear on both our parts, the relationship shifted. She stopped being someone I managed and started being someone I advised. She stopped needing me to be in the room and started needing me to be available if something came up. She stopped asking permission and started asking questions.
That transition happened gradually and then all at once, the way most important things do. It required on my part a willingness to let her take over and learn be competent. To trust that what we had built together was solid and sturdy, and that she could carry it without me. The instinct to check, to verify, to be the one who knows doesn't disappear just because she's capable. It just has to be managed differently, with a new version of the performance of calm.
What Comes Next
She is applying to colleges and soon she will fully manage her allergies on her own. She will make decisions I won't know about until after. She will handle things well and she will make mistakes and she will figure it out, because she has been building the skills to do exactly that for eighteen years.
The work I am doing now, my ongoing work, is to resist the urge to have it all figured out in advance. To stop trying to solve for every scenario before it arrives. To trust the journey for her the way I eventually learned to trust her body, her signals, her capacity. She has shown me, over and over, what she is made of. The task now, for both of us, is to let life unfold rather than manage it into submission. That is easier said than done. But we know how to do hard things.
My Greatest Teachers
People sometimes ask what it has been like to do this work. To be both a clinical psychologist, with the professional knowledge, and a food allergy mom with the hard-earned lived experience. The honest answer is that I am not sure which direction the learning has traveled most. My kids have been my greatest teachers. My youngest in particular has shown me things about trust, about the body, about advocacy and resilience and the particular grace that develops when life asks something difficult of you early and often.
Eighteen years in, standing at the edge of this next chapter, I feel gratitude for how we've worked together, for who she has become, and for everything this complicated life has made possible. And I feel excited about her future and watching her navigate what comes next. The role of food allergy parent doesn't end, it finds a new rhythm. One that involves less vigilance and managing and more witnessing. I will always be here, for consultation, cheerleading, or emotional validation, and with quiet wonder at seeing how she moves through the world on her own terms.
