Handling allergies at nursery/ childcare

[Moonhead34]

Hi I have just found this forum, I don't know anyone whose children have food allergies so it's a relief to find this!

My son is 12 months and is allergic to nuts. I am looking at nurseries for him for next year but just don't know how it's going to work.

Would love to hear anyone's experiences of food allergies and childcare... We've been advised by the allergy nurse that he should take his own food as even though the nurseries I've seen don't use nuts themselves they can't obviously promise that all the ingredients are completely nut free.

But as he'll be a toddler by then surely he will just want or try to take the food that other kids are having? Or he has to sit at a table all by himself?

My 16 mth old has a dairy allergy. It's not an anaphalaxis allergy though. We provide his milk to drink but they provide literally everything else.

They make either meals that are dairy free for everyone or do an alternative for him.

He's observed closely during mealtimes to make sure he doesn't swipe someone else's food, but sits at the same table as everyone else.

I know that he has his own crockery and cutlery to avoid cross contamination.

A good nursery should have experience of dealing with allergies and should have policies and procedures already in place that they can discuss with you so you can set everything in place

Hi - my 4 year old was diagnosed with nuts, egg and sesame allergies age 1, at 1 he was also reacting to tomatoes, but thankfully has now outgrown this. He went to a day care which had other toddlers with allergies and they had strong allergy policies which they adhered to. He had his own red plate, his food was brought directly from the kitchen by the chef and he had someone sit beside him for his entire meal. I was totally comfortable that he was safe there and he never had a reaction. The nursery also banned nuts totally from the building, even the staff were not allowed to bring them in for their own lunch. I moved him to another nursery which did not cater but he brought a packed lunch (generally for pre-school and primary children there is a no nut policy for packed lunches) and again he was very safe and they were very careful with all ingredients they used for activities or parties. he is now at school and again i selected a school which seemed to have good allergy policies and his teacher is on the ball with it too. Suggest you ask what their policies are and how many people are trained in epipens, talk to them about what sort of reaction to expect from him and keep a bottle of his antihistamine at nursery and epipens etc.