2 year old suspended from daycare, for a cheese sandwich.

reply to post by Wrabbit2000

When it's a ramp for a wheelchair or it's other means of access? That makes sense and it's the least any civilized society can do within reason.

Interesting. Considering your stance for a group that comprises less people than those with food allergies, why does it not "make sense" to accommodate those who do have life threatening food allergies?

❒Just over 6.8 million community-resident Americans use assistive devices to help them with mobility

link

Although I agree it does make sense and is civilized, why is restricting certain foods not? Especially considering this issue is becoming more and more pronounced?

CJ

reply to post by ColoradoJens


You don't see a difference between building a metal and wood addition to give physical access to a building, while troubling no one but the builder and property owner, against common to extreme food allergies that require entire groups or whole facilities to alter their individual behavior and policies, in daily life? No difference there at all?

I think the first example troubles others for the few days it's being made, and then is simply part of the scenery to anyone who doesn't need it. To those who do, it's a life changing accommodation.....without altering the lives of everyone else in the area for it to happen.

In the second example, by physical necessity of the condition we're talking about, every single person within a facility or group that may have an extreme food allergy come into it must change their behavior in marked ways and essentially permanent ones to that setting.

To put it another way..... One is troubling the few, to serve the requirements of the few which will merely be visible to the many with no further impact either way. The other is troubling the many in as direct and as serious a way as could really be considered, given the whole situation, to serve those few...who many or many not even exist as a presence to be concerned with from one time period to the next.

Dont like it?..keep your toddlers at home where you can do as you please.. and the rules you sign a contract to are all yours.

reply to post by BritofTexas


I can only assume that you are not a parent of two children under five,nor have you ever had to rush out the door in the morning and drop them off in a timely fashion before heading to your own job. Not to mention this happened in Ottawa,morning rush hour factored into his decision making process. Funny,how you still see fit to attack the father. I suppose no explaination on his part would appease you. Agree to disagree.

This won't be popular, but....

1. I question the prevalence of these "food allergies." When we say these have increased by a whopping percentage in just a few years, we seem to just take those statistics from CDC at face value. Where is the evidence, precisely? I suspect what HAS happened is a few more computers and a few more spreadsheets directed at the problem along with "awareness" campaigns that encourage people to jump on the bandwagon to claim they or their kids have yet another acronym disease. Often times things "increase" because we have broadened the definition to include more people. It's just like the "poverty level." When the poverty level gets too low, what do we do? Raise the threshold to the point that today those typed at living in poverty live like royalty compared to people in Africa and India. These things are often relative terms with the thresholds determined by bureaucrats with agendas.

2. People who have serious allergies are usually quite capable of accommodating the world. When I was young I was allergic to milk, grass, trees, coconut, animals, and a zillion other things. I was allergic to the world. So I avoided those foods and guess what? I grew out of them, or, more likely, my system grew to accept that dogs and trees were okay. But did everyone keep dogs and cats away from me? well, I didn't have one as a pet, so I adopted others in the neighborhood.

My wife has a deathly (and I do mean deathly: She stops breathing) allergy to shrimp. Does she demand shrimp be removed from every place she goes? Of course not. She simply refrains from ordering shrimp. And she's had to learn to be smart about this, too. Often a restaurant will cook shrimp on the same grill they cook, say, halibut. The oil from the shrimp cooked a few minutes before is enough to contaminate the halibut cooked a few minutes after. All she does is ensure that doesn't happen in a low-key and unobtrusive manner. There's no need to deprive every other restaurant goer, including me, from ordering shrimp.

3. There is a problem with people who claim deathly allergies to substances that may be in the same room with them: peanuts on airplanes, for example. If it's really that bad, why are they alive? What we have done is circumvent the natural process of improving the species by artificially ensuring that such deadly genes survive when they ought to have died out. This makes the species less healthy, and this process will grow over time. We are making ourselves weaker and less capable of sustaining our own lives without intervention.

But with our attitude we rush to provide Bubble Boy with a pristine environment so that he might live even if it costs millions of dollars. And you wonder why health care is so high? That's what Death Panels are all about, but we abhor the concept.

4. So here we have a daycare that is so afraid of food that it refuses to have ANY food other than that provided by the daycare because some kid might MIGHT be allergic to something. They're trying to avoid liability, right? So here's this daycare that will serve only soy milk and gluten-free rice crackers--certainly no sugar of any kind, no roast beef, in an attempt to avoid even the possibility of an allergy. Lord help these people when some kid dies of allergies to soy milk. THEN we'll see about the liability.

Meanwhile, to sane parents of the world, you cannot protect your child from everything. No one is going to cut down all the trees because your kid sneezes when he gets around them, or kill all the flowers because he's allergic to pollen, or kill all the cats because of that horrible cat dander that makes your eyes swell shut. Get your kids dirty. Let him wallow in filth once in awhile. If he touches some dog poo he's not going to die of e coli poisoning. he could even eat it and not get sick. THAT'S how to keep your kid healthy, not try to protect him from the entire world.

reply to post by schuyler


Not a bit of disagreement from here buddy.

ColoradoJens

Wrabbit2000
reply to post by ColoradoJens

 

I'd say being very proactive about what foods can come into a daycare is thoughtful and reasonable.

To the point of saying absolutely *NO* food from outside an approved school district supplier is permitted across the school property line? ( *Day Care...to be specific...and what is this setting but training to the future?)

How much is enough? When is it too much? How much accommodation do we build in before we realize...we've screwed our own quality of life in the unfettered pursuit of political correctness and the inclusion of everyone, everywhere, even if only in theory of need which MIGHT exist?

It's sad on this because the folks I find I talk to on these things, especially in real life, are too young to even realize it was NOT ALWAYS LIKE THIS. Not remotely CLOSE to this...and not THAT long ago. Jeeze.. We've lost *SO DAMN MUCH* in how we've changed SO profoundly to become the wishy washy society out for maximum comfort at any cost or sacrifice.

Sure...some consideration to allergy is logical, but you do understand that even passing exposure can lead to immediate and very serious reaction, up to and including anaphylactic shock?

Of course...it's better to train the majority to become basket cases in fear of hurting or offending the few. Naturally... I'm silly to think otherwise. (sigh)

edit on 6-3-2014 by Wrabbit2000 because: (no reason given)

That was a pretty emotional response. I never said you were silly. To your point it has not ALWAYS BEEN LIKE THIS. As I pointed out from my source, there has been a HUGE growth of food related allergies since 1997.

Why would you think that this is a PC thing? Can you see if you were operating a day care and had no controls in place and a child died what it would do to your business? I think you underestimate the number of parents with kids with food allergies and what they feel about it. Finally, a business made a decision that one had to agree with before enrolling. If they don't like the rules of the establishment they don't have to go there. Clearly not every daycare has the same set up.

CJ

Well the bottom lines is, this causes people to make concessions for those who have allergies, when those who have allergies aren't even making any concessions.

The responsibility for staying alive belongs to the one with the allergy OR the one caring for it, if it's not capable of taking care of itself.

So in this instance, the quality of the day care is in question, they could have said, "Does your kid have allergies?" and make a note, and then be responsible to make sure that they don't come into contact with the allergy... You know, kind of like any other day care on earth, or you know, your babysitter, or you know -- public school even?

Instead, make some impositions, cool, so we can all be lazy. I'm not so sure I'd even trust them with my kids if they are openly saying "We're not responsible enough to watch your kids." And make no mistake, that's exactly what they are saying.

No outside food..

Seems to me they can handle allergies way better. A parent is Not going to send the kid to school with food that will hurt that kid - so they should have a no sharing policy at the most.

No outside food means parents cant send the kids to school with food thats proper for them. Thats horrible but instead force all kids to BUY IN HOUSE FOOD.

Sounds more like a money making scam to force folks to buy food more than an allergy thing.

That's terrible! they could of at least taken away the sandwich and maybe a write up, to suspend them for two days? come on, seriously.

I personally have many food and other allergies, in fact my entire immune system is always in such a flux that I am on medication to suppress it and prevent serious reactions, inflammation etc. However, I know what my allergies are and do my best to avoid trigger situations, and I don't expect other people to limit what they eat or do. I am particularly allergic to animal dander (which I hate because I love animals but can't go near them ) so I personally don't have pets and obviously wouldn't allow any of my friends to bring dogs etc to my home, I also cannot visit friends homes who have pets, so they will come to me, but at no point would I ever suggest that they couldn't have pets to accommodate my allergies...That's ridiculous!

When my daughter was in primary school, there were a couple of incidents where all of the children had letters sent home to accommodate one child, firstly there was a young boy who had been undergoing medical treatment and it was important that he didn't contract chickenpox, so all the parents were told that under no circumstances should you send your child to school if they had it. The problem was that chickenpox is difficult to spot when it is at it's infectious phase, and apart from common cold symptoms, which can be very mild, you are unlikely to know that your child even has chickenpox until the spots have appeared, by which point it is no longer infectious. The school also had a policy that children should not be kept off school for minor sniffles etc, so it was impossible to judge whether you should keep your child off for a runny nose, that may in fact be chickenpox or risk infecting this one child by adhering to the school's policy and sending them in anyway. The entire issue was so conflicting that ultimately the parents of the sick child took him out of school until his treatment had finished and in my opinion that was the sensible thing to do.

Another incident at the same school involved the ubiquitous nut allergy and whilst parents had never been given any instructions about bringing nuts to school, one child had his lunch (a peanut butter sandwich) taken from him in the cafeteria. It was a ridiculous situation though because the school cafeteria had loads of items on the menu that contained nuts and many other children had food items, snacks etc with them that also contained nuts. The school tried defend their situation by claiming that the peanut butter was "nut intense" whereas other items only had nut traces etc in them, until of course it was pointed out that the Snickers bars, nutella chocolate spread etc that many of the other kids had was just as likely to trigger a reaction as a peanut butter sandwich...

But overall I felt it was just ridiculous that the entire school had to bend over to accommodate one child, it really is indicative of the "me first" school of thought that puts personal comfort above the basic needs of everyone else and it should be up to the parents of the child who has particular needs to ensure that their children understand their conditions and can take steps to keep themselves safe, rather than expecting the whole world to stop turning just to accommodate them.

reply to post by JohnPhoenix

No outside food..

The problem with that blanket policy is two-fold.

First, on something that matters to me but may not to others...I think a very special part of growing up is lost, atop so many things already cast to the side because adults have deemed kids stuff too silly for even kids to enjoy anymore. (ignore the fact the adults decreeing this DID have it for themselves in school). Things like birthday cupcakes or valentines day cookies or a few treats around Christmas in the class. These are things I recall to some degree in every single year of public school I attended. Not every year in every grade had all, of course. It varied...but by circumstances, not laws or regs against it.

The second and more important thing? If we ban private food onto school grounds, as is coming to be the norm? The alternative is happily, gleefully and GREEDILY offered to a fully captive and now hungry audience. The children will eat what the district and government has determined they will eat and they will further pay the price the Government/School have determined a child should pay to be fed each day.

That's happening right now, as a norm in too many places. Brown Bags are made to sound evil and dangerous....while corporate paste we call food, at triple the price of a fair profit is made to sound 'responsible' and necessary for any chance of success with a child.

I say we BAN outside contract food that isn't produced and originating from local, in-district sources where that possibility exists on ANY level (and it would in nearly ALL of them..I'll bet.) We also encourage home prepared lunches with healthy food and not the pies of toxic goo they call pizza or the little pucks of garbage they call (and may once have been) beefy hamburger patties.

I'd like to see statistics on how many kids with deathly food allergies used to die every year before we started banning all such trigger foods from their environments.

I know we all used to hear about those allergies, but I don't ever recall hearing about anyone dying from them.

So, somehow, people managed before we banned all traces of the trigger substance from their presence.

I mean, c'mon, fluorescent light bulbs are a migraine trigger for me, and my world is absolutely populated with them (thanks, Congress!), but I have yet to die from one which isn't as unusual as you might think. But I don't attempt to demand that every building within my sphere of influence go LED to suit my health and well-being.

About 20 years ago, our local school district tried to ban "cake walks" and "bake sales" at the school Carnivals.
We adults just ignored it and carried on. Potlucks are common in the local churches; or "pancake feeds" or "hot dog days" or what have you.

I wonder when "family daycare providers" (in their homes, which I did for several years) will be required to use "packaged, purchased, approved" foods to serve the littles. Shame. I had a great time fixing meals for the littles in my care....
at that time we did have to list what was fed for the 'surprise inspections' - but we got reimbursed for it, as long as it was balanced (a protein source, a bread/grain product, two veggies or fruits at every meal)...

Heck, I taught my own bairn to cook from "scrap" as my boy used to say.

I'm fortunate to live in a lenient community - where we still act like, well, people who live in an actual community. We can still burn firewood in our fireplaces; we can burn brush-piles outdoors in April and October (but at my croft we build small "campfires" outdoors at any time of year - weather permitting).

We also have locals growing fruits/vegetables and selling them out of their driveways, or truck beds, or just with handpainted signs in the easements along the driveways.

reply to post by BuzzyWigs


Heck, Junior High School still had Home Economics class when I went. I got to sit there and learn the basics of cooking and doing it without poisoning myself with stupid stuff like everyone else. That...and Wood shop and metal shop. So much is lost... (sigh)

reply to post by Wrabbit2000

Well, I know that 10 years ago they still had "shop" and "home-ec" - and even still do have those kinds of classes for kids with 'interests' in them...
My boy took a cooking class, came home and showed me what he'd learned (how to drain bacon easily, etc).
(Mmm....bacon. )

I try to buy locally grown food which they do sell at the grocer's - but walking up the road to the peach orchard and picking them off the trees, bringing them home and eating them still sun-warmed - juice dribbling all over...
ah - we loved it.

I did what I could to teach my kids healthy eating, shopping, meal-planning, budgeting, along with gardening and animal care. That's missing for a lot of people; I agree. It's sad.

People with allergies to very common things need to stop expecting everyone else to cater to their medical conditions.

I'm allergic to nuts, yet I dont expect everyone to stop eating nuts around me. If someones kid is so hyper sensitive to common, every day items, then that kid should not be put in daycare, they should stay at home with their parents.

Wrabbit2000
reply to post by JohnPhoenix

 

No outside food..



I say we BAN outside contract food that isn't produced and originating from local, in-district sources where that possibility exists on ANY level (and it would in nearly ALL of them..I'll bet.) We also encourage home prepared lunches with healthy food and not the pies of toxic goo they call pizza or the little pucks of garbage they call (and may once have been) beefy hamburger patties.

You know, one of my first thoughts about this incident was wishing I could have a glance at their in facility menu...
Wonder if there is any bread, process cheese on that menu?

ketsuko
I'd like to see statistics on how many kids with deathly food allergies used to die every year before we started banning all such trigger foods from their environments.

I know we all used to hear about those allergies, but I don't ever recall hearing about anyone dying from them.

So, somehow, people managed before we banned all traces of the trigger substance from their presence.

There is also a fine line between an intolerance, and an allergy at times. Not all "allergies" are life threatening. An "intolerance" is not an allergy, however...many people will use the terms alternately to mean the same thing.I do not know how this also may factor into the daycare policy.

Wrabbit2000
reply to post by BuzzyWigs

 

Heck, Junior High School still had Home Economics class when I went. I got to sit there and learn the basics of cooking and doing it without poisoning myself with stupid stuff like everyone else. That...and Wood shop and metal shop. So much is lost... (sigh)

Closing Wood/Metal Shop has nothing to do with Safety or the "Nanny State". And everything to do with Underfunding.

Chino Valley Unified's school board has had to make millions of dollars worth of budget cuts this year to stave off fiscal insolvency. In January, the district had been looking at a potential $30 million deficit by 2013 if no cuts were made. The woodshop class will no longer be offered in the 2011-12 school year.

Last woodshop class to close in Chino Valley school district

Wood shops in schools around the U.S. are hitting a wall. Even as the U.S. rethinks how we've approached education and industrial policy, high schools and community colleges are dismantling carpentry and wood shop classrooms -a product of budget cutting and flagging student interest.

Don't Let 'Em Close Your School's Wood Shop

It gets even more retarded if you look into what the suspension was about:

A cheese sandwich.

Cheese.

Do you know how increibly rare it is to have an actual allergy to cheese? It's basically always an intolerance, not an allergy, meaning their body just doesn't digest it as well as other foods. They fart and poop more. Something that someone running a daycare should probably get used to dealing with.


So this place only has rice crackers and soy milk? Should be interesting to see what they do when a child with diabetes gets low blood sugar and there are no apples around. People with diabetes: 8% of the population; people who are allergic to apples: 0.000012% of the population.

I'm glad this daycare doesn't have a math program.