When Your Child Is Diagnosed with Food Allergies: Preschool & Daycare Edition

We decided to send Tommy to the same preschool his big sisters attended.

Since he’s our third child, I felt like a seasoned pro. The school cooks lunch on-site, which meant no packing lunchboxes. And several other kids there had allergies, so surely they had a system in place.

Well, it turned out not to be that simple.

Lunchtime at Preschool and Daycare

When you enroll a child with allergies, you start by submitting a detailed checklist. Next, you sit down with the school’s cook to go over the specifics. For most families, that’s the end of it.

For some reason, though, Tommy’s case went one step further: a meeting with the school director. What caught their attention was his history of having reactions even when he hadn’t eaten the trigger food.

Their decision? Eating in the same room as the other kids was too risky, so Tommy would have lunch in a separate room with a teacher.

I’d been dreading the moment they’d ask me to just send a packed lunch, so this response completely blew me away. They went above and beyond.

And honestly, they were right to be careful. Kids this age are unpredictable, and you can’t take your eyes off them for a second. This very school once had an incident where a child pressed a food into the hand of a classmate with allergies, and it caused quite a commotion. Tommy touches everything and is almost always sucking on his fingers. And lunchtime is a mess for everyone. Sometimes there’s a hard-boiled egg rolling across the floor. Sometimes stew is creeping over from the next seat.

Their concern made total sense. Lunchtime at preschool is a lot riskier than most people realize.

A year went by. Looking back, I think the staff had been stretching far beyond their limits for us. Eventually they told us they didn’t have enough people to keep watching Tommy so closely, and that with his developmental challenges, he was struggling to keep up. They encouraged us to look at other schools.

Packed Lunches at Preschool

So for the second year of preschool (the four-year-old class), Tommy started at another school nearby.

This one has no cafeteria. Every child brings a lunch from home.

Cue the daily lunchbox panic.

My Go-To Lifesavers

#1: KS Frozen Sesame Dumplings

These are one of the few frozen foods Tommy can eat. Are they technically a “main dish”? Debatable. But he loves them, which is what counts. They’re big enough to fill up space in the lunchbox, and you can pack them straight from the freezer. They even double as an ice pack.

#2: Ajinomoto Tender Young Chicken Karaage

(Karaage is Japanese-style fried chicken.) Almost every frozen karaage on the market contains egg or wheat, but this one has neither. It’s tender, so even little kids can chew it easily.

The Goal of Managing Food Allergies Isn’t Restriction

Once your child starts preschool or daycare, new challenges come up: school lunches, field trips, snack swaps with friends.

Safety always comes first, of course.

But if you start cutting out foods that aren’t medically necessary, or avoid every restaurant and playdate, it takes a heavy toll on your child’s diet and social life. That’s why I think it’s important to find ways to live as normally as possible.

Even though we switched to packed lunches, Tommy gets to eat in the same classroom as everyone else. His desk is set a little apart from the others, but he can still chat with his friends.

That arrangement exists thanks to his teachers’ kindness. They move his desk slightly away from the group. And when lunch is over, they pick up any food that’s fallen on the floor and wipe down the tables. That’s all it takes, and Tommy’s days got so much happier. I can’t thank them enough.

Now, I have a confession. When other moms invited us to lunch with the kids, I said no more often than not. Allergies were part of it, but so were Tommy’s developmental challenges, which made eating out difficult.

Looking back, I wish I’d tried a little harder to find ways to enjoy restaurants and time with friends. Rather than restricting things to feel safe, I want to keep adding to what he can do, one step at a time.

I’ll write about the elementary school years next, too.

Until then, take care!