With personal insights gained from raising a child with a multiple food allergies, writer Alison Orman in association with Dr Preeti Joshi offers Australian families tips, advice and encouragement in Managing Your Child’s Food Allergies: The Complete Australian Guide for Parents (HarperCollins, 2009). Written with everyday family life in mind, this book offers practical solutions to common problems experienced by children with mild to severe food allergies.
Managing Your Child’s Food Allergies
Designed as a supplement to professional advice and medical treatment, Managing Your Child’s Food Allergies offers background information and details of relevant research as well as tips for the day to day management of food allergies within the home.
Managing Your Child’s Food Allergies helps parents understand the difference between a food allergy and food intolerance, the different diagnosis and treatment regime formats, and ongoing management of allergies in the home and socially through childhood and teen years. The information given is general, but can be applied to a range of food allergens including nut, wheat and dairy allergies.
The book has an easy to follow, easy-to-read format that follows a logical progression through the experience of living with the challenges of food allergies within the home. The text is divided into four sections:
- Understanding food allergy – diagnosis, definitions, allergy testing, anaphylaxis and information on common food allergies
- Managing food allergy – food labelling, eating out and travelling with a child with food allergies, childcare and pre-school issues, socialising
- The emotions of food allergies – anxiety issues for parents and children
- Food allergy in the future – allergy prevention and future treatments
Presented in a very reader-friendly format, the book includes easy-to-read text, information fact boxes and tables, and Q&A entries and quotes from parents of children with allergies which lends the book a very inclusive, approachable tone.
Practical Advice for Managing Children’s Food Allergies
Alison Orman brings a parent’s viewpoint to the issue of managing food allergies with children, from both a practical and emotional perspective, drawing on her own experience of living with a child with a food allergy. She acknowledges the sense of isolation and fear that can accompany the diagnosis of allergy in a young child and offers empathetic encouragement to parents through her practical tips and advice.
Information includes detailed lists of foods to avoid for specific allergies and advice on ensuring that children with allergies maintain a healthy balanced diet, offering alternatives to common allergy triggers such as cow’s milk, egg and wheat.
In her introduction, Orman discusses the feeling of isolation she experienced when her son was diagnosed with a severe food allergy. She avoided play groups and other social get togethers through fear of possible allergic reactions and lack of confidence in telling others about the precautions that were necessary for her son.
With this in mind, Orman has included practical tips for managing a child’s food allergies in a variety of social settings including eating out, socialising with friends, birthday parties, cruises, air travel and travelling overseas as well as discussing the emotional toll allergies can take on parents and children.
Alison Orman
Alison Orman is a writer and editor with more than 15 years experience in publishing. She holds a BA in Communications and Master of Professional Writing, both from the University of Technology, Sydney. She is the mother of a young son with multiple food allergies and lives in Melbourne, Australia with her husband and two young children.
Dr Preeti Joshi
Dr Preeti Joshi, MBBS (Hons) FRACP PhD is a specialist Paediatrician in Allergy and Immunology at the Children’s Hospital Westmead, Sydney. She is involved in caring for children with allergies and teaching other doctors and specialists about the recognition and management of allergies.
Practical Advice for the Everyday Management of Children’s Food Allergies
With a combination of Orman’s personal experience and research and the benefits of Dr Joshi’s professional expertise, Managing Your Child’s Food Allergies offers parents a comprehensive guide to understanding the diagnosis and everyday management of childhood food allergies.
With links to additional information including useful websites and recommended allergy-friendly cookbooks, Managing Your Child’s Food Allergies provides parents with the tools they need to deal with the challenges of managing food allergies in children on a day to day basis.
Review copy details:
Managing Your Child’s Food Allergies (ISBN: 978-0-7322-8528-9, 410 pages)
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