Nearly 20% of food-allergic kids, their parents experience bullying
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Approximately one in five children and parents reported being bullied due to the child’s food allergy, survey data showed.
Previous studies show children with food allergy “experience a variety of threats in school,” Olivia Negris, MS, a research assistant at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine, told Healio Primary Care. These can include verbal taunts of allergen exposure, being touched by an allergen, having an allergen tossed towards them and deliberate cross-contact of their food with an allergen, Negris said.
To learn more about food allergy-related bullying, Negris and colleagues analyzed survey data from 252 parents whose children participated in the FORWARD study.
“Due to the underrepresentation of Black families in existing food allergy-related psychosocial research, we also sought to study other effects of food allergy on these children and their families,” study coauthor Dannielle Brown, MHS, of the Center for Food Allergy and Asthma Research and Science & Outcomes of Allergy & Asthma Research Program at the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, told Healio Primary Care.
The prospective multi-center cohort study recruited children aged 12 years and younger who identified themselves as either non-Hispanic Black or non-Hispanic white and had a physician-diagnosed food allergy. The survey’s results were released during the virtual American College of Allergy, Asthma and Immunology Annual Scientific Meeting.
According to the researchers, the survey showed:
- 18.7% of all children experienced bullying because of their food allergy, with no significant racial differences among victims of bullying;
- 17.3% of parents experienced teasing or bullying that stemmed from their child’s food allergy; and
- 48.7% of parents who intervened in their child’s bullying said it was helpful in ending the bullying.
The researchers also reported that instances of bullying were lower among schools that banned peanut products. Among all parents surveyed, 92% said their child had their own epinephrine auto-injector at school and 26% said the school had epinephrine in stock.
“Having a food allergy puts tremendous stress on the entire family and any form of bullying makes life that much harder,” study coauthor Ruchi Gupta, MD, MPH, a professor of pediatrics and medicine at Northwestern Medicine, said in a press release.
The researchers encouraged health care professionals to mediate bullying experiences linked to food allergies.
“Primary care physicians and allergists can routinely educate families about school food allergy policies that promote safety and social inclusion, the benefits of having a school food allergy management plan on file and the possibility that food allergy-related bullying could occur,” Brown said. “They can also assess the school and peer experiences of their food-allergic patients during appointments and encourage parents to speak with school officials when needed. Clinicians should also use open-ended questions about patient experiences that do not require children to specifically label their experiences as bullying.”
Perspective
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Tania Elliott, MD, FAAAAI, FACAAI
Food allergies can be life threatening, and we need to do more from a public health perspective to educate and destigmatize. Only half of people in this study felt that speaking up was helpful. We need to do a better job equipping schools with the tools on how to address food allergy-related bullying.
Spokesperson, American College of Allergy, Asthma and Immunology
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