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Children with food allergies suffer bullying at school
Last reviewed: 01.07.2025
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Scientists from the Mount Sinai School of Medicine have found that children with food allergies are often targets for bullying by their peers.
Nearly eight percent of American children have food allergies to foods such as peanuts, tree nuts, milk, eggs, and shellfish.
Food allergy is a serious condition characterized by an immediate allergic reaction to food that is harmless to a healthy person. Some products may contain many food allergens. Usually these are proteins, less often carbohydrates and fats. The body produces a large number of antibodies, due to which the body perceives an absolutely harmless protein as an infectious agent, with which it begins to fight.
Most often, food allergies are caused by heredity, and a child whose mother or father suffers from food allergies has a twofold increased risk of developing one compared to children whose parents do not have allergies.
Having learned that their child has a food allergy, parents try to identify allergens to help their child avoid allergic reactions. However, almost half of the parents surveyed – 47.9% – did not even suspect that their children were being bullied and abused by other children.
Children who experienced abuse and whose parents knew their child was being bullied because of illness reported a reduced quality of life and increased levels of stress and anxiety.
The results of the scientists' research were published in the scientific journal "Pediatrics".
"Parents and teachers should be vigilant and talk to such children about their relationships with peers. In this way, adults will be able to intervene in the situation and reduce the child's stress level, as well as improve his or her quality of life," says the lead author of the study, professor of pediatrics and psychiatry, MD Eyal Shemesh. "Children with food allergies are very vulnerable and defenseless, and, as we know, schoolchildren are not known for their humanity and compassion. Children can throw peanuts at a child suffering from a food allergy or simply hold them near the child's nose. Therefore, if parents learn of such incidents, it is better to transfer the child to another school and protect him or her from manifestations of child cruelty."
The research team led by Dr. Shemesh involved more than 250 families who attended an allergy clinic.
The experts conducted a survey in which parents and children answered the same questions aimed at assessing their quality of life and stress levels, which could be affected by bullying related to food allergies.
It turned out that 45% of children aged eight to seventeen are bullied by their peers because of an allergic reaction to certain types of food. The children said that classmates often wave the food to which the child has a food allergy in front of their face or force them to touch it.
Naturally, the more severe the bullying and abuse, the worse the quality of life of such children.
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