Day Cares Struggle with Allergies

I used to sit on the Policy Committee of the Glebe Parents Day Care, and at one point we struggled with how to handle anaphylactic and non-life-threatening allergies within the day care. It is important for the day care to do whatever it can to ensure the safety of the children, which justifies a complete ban on peanuts and tree nuts in the day care. But this gets complicated when a family claims their child has a life threatening allergy to, say, eggs — something that is very difficult or impossible to eliminate completely. In our day care, some of the staff would have been willing to turn away children with allergies that we could not accommodate, and it was lucky that parents on the committee resisted and made the point that by excluding these children from day cares they would be marginalized, and their parents would be put in a very difficult situation. I raised the prospect that it would in fact be a human rights violation to have a policy of turning away children with life-threatening allergies.

Of course, other day cares across the country are dealing with the same questions, and some have decided to exclude the children rather than accommodate them: link