‘Do you think this is normal?’: risk, temporality, and the management of children’s food allergies through online support groups

Abstract

Through an online ethnographic analysis of a Facebook allergy group in Turkey, this article investigates how mothers carry out the daily process of managing risks and making decisions relating to the diets of babies with food allergies. Where allergy-management advice provided clinically by doctors tends to take the form of a relatively uniform and future-oriented risk-management process, parents making dietary decisions for babies with food allergies often need immediate advice that doctors cannot provide. To meet this need, many mothers complement the advice they receive from doctors with the knowledge and expertise of strangers online in making decisions about their children’s diet. Through a focus on how mothers engage with issues of allergy-related risk in an online community, this study demonstrates the different layers of temporality mothers navigate and the different strategies they employ in responding to allergy-related risk and how these co-exist, often complementarily, with the clinical management of allergies.

Keywords:

• Risk
• Temporality
• Food allergy
• Facebook
• Motherhood
• Infant feeding

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. According to Boyce et al. (2010), allergic responses to food can be the result of any of a number of gastrointestinal disorders, including immediate GI hypersensitivity, eosinophilic oesophagitis, eosinophilic gastroenteritis, food protein–induced allergic proctocolitis, food protein–induced enterocolitis syndrome, and oral allergy syndrome.

2. When the diagnosis is otherwise unclear, the ‘gold standard’ for determining whether a child has a food allergy is what is called the oral food challenge (Caffarelli et al., 2010), which involves feeding children with particular suspect foods at certain time intervals and carefully observing their reaction. Despite its usefulness as a diagnostic tool, the oral food challenge has several drawbacks, including the danger of exacerbating existing symptoms, causing emotional distress, and triggering an acute allergic reaction leading to potentially fatal anaphylactic shock (Nowak-Wegrzyn 2009).

3. For different support categories in online communities, see Loader et al. (2002) for diabetes patients, Braithwaite et al. (1999) for disabled people, and Coulson (2005) for Irritable Bowel Syndrome patients.

4. Unlike many places in the West, where ‘food allergy-related policy discussions are being dominated by affected individuals and their advocates’ (Harrington et al., 2012), in Turkey, affected individuals have little power over the policy-making process and are thus forced to create alternative platforms to deal with allergies.

5. Reciting these prayers alone or as a group is believed bring good fortune and divine favour.

6. It is worth noting here that posts of this sort are virtually non-existent on equivalent platforms based in the United States, as are mentions of mucous or bloody stools.

7. The Facebook group has a ‘kids poop folder’ that includes different sample pictures of stools (from kids being fed only hypoallergic formulas; kids with very mucous or bloody poops; kids who have recently been introduced to solid foods; etc.). Thus, if the mother is confused about what ‘proper’ or ‘normal’ stool should look like, she can check these visual samples at any time and make a decision about her child’s diet accordingly.

8. A small amount of mucus can be safely ignored. However, if the amount of mucus is increasing or becoming less sticky and more gelatinous, this is a warning that bloody stool might be next, and thus the diet must be changed.