Accomodating Allergies in Home Daycare

Hello Everyone,

I am new to the forum. I did home daycare a couple of years ago before my son was born. I took a coupe years off due to my son's health problems, but now that he has stabilized I am considering opening up again but I have a few questions and wondering if I can get some insight from you all.

Over the past 3 years we have discovered that both my children have quite a few allergies, dairy, gluten, eggs, bananas, oranges to name a few. I was wondering how you all would go about handling food allergies in the home daycare especially since it's my own children with the dietary limitations?

Let me know what you think. I appreciate any insight. Thanks!

I would make client aware of household allergy and then provide food so I control food in house. No outside food permit, child wash hand on arrival because always family not take it seriously and eat banned food on way to daycare.

You may actually find quite a few clients who would jump at the chance for an allergy-aware daycare. One of my first clients was a family who's son had a severe peanut and tree nut allergy. My house became nut-free for the 2 years he was with me, I read labels on everything, took his epi-pen with us every time we went anywhere, etc. We never had a problem but it was a LOT harder than I had thought it would be, and I probably wouldn't take on another child with food allergies again.

I know many providers won't take kids with allergies, as it's a huge risk, not to mention an inconvenience. I've seen people posting ads looking for caregivers and as soon as they mention food allergies, they don't get too many responses.

If you advertised an "allergy-aware" environment, using your children's allergies as a PLUS as opposed to something parents would have to work around, I think many parents with children with serious food allergies would be interested. I have no idea how you'd work out what to serve all of them, but if you could find children who's allergies were similar to your own children's (or at least kids with no other allergies that yours DON'T have) then I would assume you're pretty used to coming up with a menu that eliminates all of those foods.

Obviously I would say absolutely NO outside food is allowed to come into the daycare, but again, if you advertised that you were specifically looking for kids with allergies, I would imagine that would be a given for those parents, as they have the same worries about their child accidentally consuming something they shouldn't that you do.