What I Wish Every Parent Knew Before Starting Solids (From 25 Years as a Paediatric Nurse) -

The moment “you know your child best” stopped being true

For most of my career, I lived by one phrase with parents: you know your child better than anyone. It’s almost always true. But there were two moments in the allergy clinic that changed how I say that.

We were doing food challenges, feeding babies small amounts of a food they were allergic to, to see if they’d grown out of it. Twice, I watched a mum describe her baby as “just a bit sleepier than usual… not their normal nap time.” Nothing dramatic. But as a nurse who’d spent years in that room, I could see something the parents couldn’t yet: a little paler than normal, a certain stillness that wasn’t right. Within thirty seconds of us moving that baby to another room, they were being given an adrenaline injection, as they were having an anaphylactic reaction.

That’s the only time in my career I’ve seen “you know your child best” not quite hold, because severe allergic reactions in small children so often don’t look the way parents expect them to.

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Anaphylaxis doesn’t look like the movies

My day-to-day as an allergy nurse involved skin prick testing, taking a full history, and running food challenges, 8 to 14 children a day, testing reactions to nuts, egg, milk, fish, and more of the top nine allergy foods, in careful incremental doses.

Here’s what surprised me most, over and over: parents rarely spot a severe reaction as fast as they expect to, especially the first time they see anaphylaxis. In films, it’s loud, swollen faces, dramatic collapse. In real life, the first sign is often a quiet, persistent cough that turns into a wheeze we can only really hear with a stethoscope. Parents are often shocked that their baby “didn’t look that bad” moments before we needed to act. But that quiet cough was already escalating, quickly.

If your child develops breathing difficulty, a sudden persistent cough, a wheeze, or becomes very pale, lethargic or floppy, that’s a sign of a severe allergic reaction. Call an ambulance, and if you have an EpiPen, follow your action plan.

The biggest update in infant allergy prevention

There’s now strong research behind introducing the top nine allergy foods, egg, milk, nuts, soy, fish, shellfish, wheat, and sesame, before your baby turns one. This genuinely reduces the rate of allergy diagnosis, and we have particularly strong data on egg. This recommendation holds even if your child has a family history of allergy, or has eczema.

Egg and milk ladders: what they’re actually for

One of the most common mix-ups I see: egg and milk ladders are brilliant tools, but they’re only for children who’ve already been diagnosed with an egg or milk allergy or intolerance. They’re a genuine step-by-step approach for that specific situation.

If your baby hasn’t tried egg yet at all, you don’t start at “step one” of the ladder, you’d typically go straight for something like scrambled egg. Ladders are a reintroduction tool for a known issue, not the starting point for every baby.

Allergy vs. intolerance, the myth that needs to die

Food allergy symptoms can look a lot like intolerance or reflux symptoms, tummy pain, vomiting, diarrhoea, general unhappiness. That overlap is genuinely confusing, and it’s exactly why getting a proper diagnosis from a specialist matters so much. Intolerance isn’t life-threatening, but it can still seriously affect a child’s day-to-day life and comfort. Allergy can be life-threatening. They are not the same thing, and the words matter.

Allergy affects the immune system. Intolerance affects the digestive system. If your child has an allergy, please don’t let it get softened into “intolerance” at a restaurant or a café, that language difference could matter enormously in an emergency.

One more important clarification: a child isn’t “anaphylactic to milk but just allergic to egg.” If they’re allergic to both, they have the potential for anaphylaxis with either one, regardless of what’s happened before. Past reactions don’t set a ceiling on what a future reaction could look like.

Why I’ve brought this into the workplace

One in ten babies now has a diagnosed food allergy. Weaning is hard enough without adding the worry of allergy on top of it, and increasingly, it’s working parents who are managing all of this alongside a job.

That’s why I now run a Working Parents’ Clinical Support Program, supporting parents year-round with general childhood sickness, weaning troubles, allergy worries, and all the things that come with them, including the time off work they can bring.

Whether you’re a parent at home looking for that support, or an HR or People & Culture professional wanting to bring this into your workplace, I’d love to help. You’ll find everything at the link in my bio, or feel free to reach out directly.

Looking for more practical support?

If you’re looking for simple, evidence-based resources to help you navigate food allergies, introducing allergenic foods, egg ladders, choking first aid, I’ve created a growing collection of practical guides & allergy toolkits for busy parents.

Every resource has been designed to save you time, reduce the mental load and help you feel more confident caring for your child.

Browse all of my digital resources in my Nurses Store.