Do Food Allergies Get Easier to Manage as You Get Older?
Time and again, I hear food allergy parents utter the phrase, “at least it’ll be easier once they get older”. And I wonder, is this a statement of belief, or of hope?
The truth is, living with food allergy doesn’t get easier as we get older. Not the slightest bit, from where I’m sitting. I’m not saying this to be negative, I just think it’s important to share a truth that it took me a long time to realize. I held on to a sense of hope during my teen and early adult years, and when it finally set in that things won’t necessarily “improve” it was a big pill to swallow. I wish I hadn’t carried that bubble in the first place; when it burst, I got hit.
What I like to say is that it doesn’t get easier, it just gets different.
Every phase of life carries with it unique challenges and successes. Your frame of what those challenges and successes are will shift over time.
As young food allergy kids, the parents bear the major load of keeping the child safe, and it is a lot to carry. For many families, it’s a total life adjustment, if they are not familiar with food allergy already. They’re also tasked with ensuring they transfer that knowledge to their kids, who will eventually have to manage their food allergy entirely on their own. Passing down this knowledge so that the teen can independently manage their allergy is so important for ensuring future success.
Some of the challenges for the FA kid themselves may include social segregation in the classroom, feeling different or standing out because they can’t participate in some activities, not being able to enjoy the same treats as everyone else, food allergy bullying, missing out on events, anxiety and fear of food/reactions, PTSD from previous reactions, and of course, the terrifying reactions themselves. Parents are tasked with many duties, such as ensuring they have safe food, calling manufacturers about products, researching ingredients and restaurants, planning safe travel, and dealing with teachers and other parents at the school, as well as the weight of anxiety about their child having a reaction.
The teen years are when the burden of management inevitably shifts from the parent to the child. In high school, kids are not given the same safety net in classrooms that they are in elementary school. They may be in up to 8 classrooms per day for different subjects. Kids from other areas and schools feed into one high school, so everyone hasn’t known them since childhood. And the regular teen issues like self-consciousness, dating and relationships, friend politics, etc still apply. Pile on top of this the weight of learning to manage your allergies on your own, and you’ve mixed a pretty risky cocktail. While some of the challenges from their younger years have gone away, they have been replaced with new ones that the individual must address independently. Even the most precocious kids will have to learn to find balance.
The same applies to adulthood. I moved into apartment-style residence for the first two years of university, then to a condo in Toronto. When I made that transition in my first year, I was assuming the full burden of managing my food allergies. It wasn’t a smooth process, but I adapted and learned what I had to do to keep myself safe.
Did I take some risks that my parents wouldn’t have advised? Yep! Did I learn from those mistakes? You bet! In school, you’re living with strangers, meeting new people all the time, your environment constantly changing. In my case, I was in a big city, so I still had access to my safe products and also to my family who lived in a suburb of the city. Much like how my parents felt guilt when I had reactions in the past, I felt guilt and mistrust towards myself when I had reactions as a young adult. Those same challenges that my parents faced, I now had to take on. Calling companies, deciding on restaurants, travel, etc, didn’t go away, but fell solely to me. My PTSD and anxiety intensified, and worsened my already challenging relationship with food.
Navigating corporate life with food allergy posed a set of challenges similar to that of elementary school. There were food allergy bullies, I often couldn’t participate in events, people didn’t understand and I had to explain myself over and over again. Office kitchens are suss pools of crumbs, spills, dirty cutlery, and filthy microwaves. So many functions and meetings involved food; it was impossible to escape. I didn’t have anyone to carefully coordinate things behind the scenes, as my parents would have done when I was a kid.
Bonding with colleagues over coffee or grabbing lunch was something I saw my peers doing, but was often difficult for me to participate in. When I did join for a lunch, or the pot luck (why are there so many company potluck parties? Does anyone enjoy these?), and couldn’t eat anything, it exposed a vulnerability of mine that I may not have wanted to share. The conversation inevitably turns to me and my allergy and what happens when I have a reaction and oh wow that person would die if they couldn’t eat ice cream anymore. It was unnerving and frustrating.
Telling my colleagues that I had multiple food allergy not only made me feel vulnerable, but young. Adults often associate food allergy with kids in a classroom, and I felt myself being parented by the people from whom I was trying to gain respect.
At 25, when the opportunity to make a vertical jump in my career came, I was eager to take it, even though it required very frequent travel. I had never traveled totally solo before, but I decided to go for it and just make it work. Dining in restaurants in countries I had never visited before, where they didn’t speak English, where the food and company was unfamiliar, on airlines I had never flown - it was all part of the experience, and I had trust enough in myself that I could make it work.
Outside of work, your social life demands that you do the logistical planning and investigation that your parents used to do. Planning restaurants, talking to the chef, planning travel and which foods I will pack, where I will eat, bringing my Epi’s, knowing where the hospitals are, etc. is fully my responsibility. I’m glad that my parents exposed me to eating in restaurants so often as a kid so that it is not an unfamiliar situation for me as an adult.
Allergies can change over time, meaning that you have to retrain yourself on a new allergen, or prepare for an oral challenge, or take yourself to skin prick appointments. Food trends will also necessitate you to adapt your habits. Legume ingredients, for example, have become very popular in the last few years, causing me to revisit many of the flours, pastas, cookies, milk alternatives, yogurt alternatives, and other products that I had safely eaten for years, but were now unsafe due to cross-contact or change in ingredients.
Throughout my life, I’ve dealt with anxiety, obsessive compulsive tendencies, and disordered eating. These are all things that I don’t think I could have been trained for, and that my parents can’t really help me with. These are things for me to work on myself, and for which I have a lot of support from close friends within the food allergy community.
How we talk to, and about, our kids with food allergy is influential towards their overall outlook and future independence. Empowering them, accepting that food allergy is a disease with no cure, that they will likely not grow out of it, that they will have to learn to do this on their own, can have positive impacts. Be aware of whether you are transferring your anxieties to them, and of whether you are doing things for them rather than teaching them to do safely for themselves.
What do you think? Do you agree that there is no break or easy period, but rather a series of changing and ever evolving situations to navigate and adapt to over the course of one’s life?