Glutened By Grandma

[rick-spiff]

When my son visits his grandma she gives him what she persieves what is safe and my son comes home with stomach aches and red ears.

I try to talk to her but she won't take responsibility for feeding him foods that he's allergic to. she doesn't think that wheat is in certain foods and you can't tell her otherwise.

she is not my mom or my mother-in-law. I never married her son so sometimes she doesn't even listen to me.

Just tired of dealing with my son afterwards....

[MySuicidalTurtle]

Have you shown her what happens to his insides when he has gluten? Does she know it can stunt his growth and lead to cancer? Maybe she needs to be scared into providing good food or his Dad needs to say something. Or worst case, maybe she shouldn't be allowed to care for him then. He cannot heal if he is getting glutened by her. It is not fair to him at all!

[Mom23boys]

Hubby and I went to a counselor over this type of an issue. He said that the kids were not to be left alone with her ever again. He even went on to say that since we knew she was endangering their lives he would turn US in if he ever thought we were allowing unsupervised visits. I think he got his point across.

[dandelionmom]

No more unsupervised visits. Period. She doesn't get to make your son sick. Sorry that is happening.

[Phyllis28]

I agree, no unsupervised visits right now. Explain that this will continue until you are sure he can be safe. One safe arrangement might be to send all his food if she will agree not to feed him anything else. She would also have to agree to handle and store the food in a safe manner.

Hope you are able to resolve this.

[kbtoyssni]

I wouldn't let him visit her alone if she can't keep him safe, either. This obviously isn't a one-time mistake. You can go with him to visit or grandma can come to you or you can all meet at the zoo or something. I'm sure it's hard to lay down the law like this, but you may find that insisting and enforcing that he can't visit alone may cause the seriousness of this disease to sink in and for her to become more cooperative. Although even if she does start to get it, I would still send food with him because it's really hard to know everything that contains gluten if you don't live this.

[Juliebove]

I would pack plenty of food, including snacks and tell her that he can't eat anything other than what you sent. Hopefully it will get better once he is older and he can tell for himself what he can and can't eat. For my daughter I get shelf stable meals like Orgran canned pasta, My Own Meals, Shelton's Chicken and Wild Rice soup. She also has single serve packets of almond butter, jelly, two slice packs of gluten-free bread, single serve Trix bowls, etc. I also buy Ian's chicken dinners, chicken nuggets and fish sticks. Fruit Rollups make a nice snack.

Another thing you might do is limit the visit to an hour or two. In that length of time, hopefully no food will be served. But just in case, send along a snack and tell her he can have that if he is hungry.

Of course there is always the chance she is one of those people who simply will not listen to you and thinks she is doing the kid a favor by giving him what she perceives as things "you don't want him to have". I dealt with that when we lived in another state. We didn't know of my daughter's food allergies then, but I tried to feed her a healthy, organic diet. She had a bit of a weight problem so I wanted her snacks to be mainly fruits and vegetables. The neighbors were constantly sneaking her food because they thought I was too strict. She was too little then to say "no" and would just dutifully eat what they gave her, then come home and be too full to eat dinner.

[cruelshoes]

I always try to look for the best in people and believe that, most of the time, people have good intentions. BUT......

Anyone that cannot be trusted to read and understand a label cannot be trusted to feed our children. Period. I would not allow anyone to repeatedly gluten my child. I doesn't have to get confrontational or anything, I would just immediately put a stop to any encounter that would result in the possibility of that person feeding him. Providing the food or limiting visits to a short time are good suggestions from the posters above. You know her better than we do - if you provided the food, would she stick to it? Or would she still sneak in gluten items?

Giving food to a child that has been diagnosed as intolerant to it is unacceptable in my eyes. Perhaps it is that labels are hard to figure out or perhaps it is wilful disregard. Either way the result is the same - a sick kid.

I hope this is resolved soon.