This article is more than 5 years old. Information may no longer be current.
Many children with food allergies bullied
Click Here to Manage Email Alerts
About half of the children participating in a recent survey who had been previously diagnosed with food allergies also reported being bullied.
Eyal Shemesh, MD, chief of the division of behavioral and developmental health in the department of pediatrics and Kravis Children’s Hospital, and colleagues surveyed 251 pairs of parents and children who were consecutively recruited during routine allergy clinic visits. Bullying related to food allergy or for any cause, quality of life, and distress in both the child and parent were evaluated using validated questionnaires.
Eyal Shemesh
One-third of those surveyed reported being bullied specifically because of their food allergy. Children in the study ranged in age from 8 to 17 years.
“The main findings from this study are that bullying of food-allergic children is very common (almost half of the children reported experiencing bullying at some point) and is associated with lower quality of life,” Shemesh, who is also with the division of pediatric allergy, and the Elliot and Roslyn Jaffe Food Allergy Institute at Mount Sinai Medical Center, told Infectious Diseases in Children.
Nearly half of the parents surveyed were not aware of the bullying — although both the bullied children and their parents reported experiencing higher stress levels and lower quality of life.
“Parents knew about it only in about half of the cases, but when they did know, the child’s quality of life was better than that of children whose parents did not know that they were bullied,” Shemesh said. “Those results suggest that parents and clinicians should actively inquire about bullying: It is not sufficient to wait until the child decides to disclose it on his or her own. When identified, bullying episodes should be addressed (with the offender or the school) directly.”
The researchers said these results may still underestimate the true rate of bullying experienced by children with food allergies, and clinicians might consider asking a screening question about bullying during visits with children who have food allergies.
Eyal Shemesh, MD, can be reached at Division of Behavioral and Developmental Pediatrics, the Department of Pediatrics, Box 1198, Mount Sinai Medical Center, 1 Gustave L Levy Place, New York, NY 10029; email: EMPOWER@ mssm.edu.
Disclosure: Shemesh reports no relevant financial disclosures.
Click Here to Manage Email Alerts