How to Tell if your Toddler has an Allergy

There are different kinds of allergies your toddler could be affected by including dust, pollen, insects, animal dander, food, drugs & mold that can be expressed through problems affecting their respiratory system, skin health, or intestinal health. How can you tell if you toddler has an allergy? Well there are various ways to detect allergies in toddlers, but it can be tricky as symptoms can range from mild to severe. An allergy that causes chronic mild allergies can go undetected for years, so uping you parental observational skills will really help here.

Things You'll Need

• Toddler
• Journal
• Observational Skills

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Instructions

• 1

  Start a journal or diary of your child's health. That way you can note correlations between symptoms and possible causes of those symptoms. Use your journal in helping you answer and document the questions in the following steps to help you on your quest to discover if your child may have an allergy.

• 2

  To determine if your toddler has a nasal allergy, consider the following questions. Does your child always have a cold? If your child has been experiencing cold symptoms for more than a week and a half, they may be suffering from a nasal allergy. Is she sneezy with red watery eyes? Look at the skin under her eyes, does it have a darker appearance? Breathing through the mouth, wheezing, snoring, coughing and irritated/rashy skin are also symptoms of a nasal allergy. Another indicator may be if your child is a frequent sufferer of ear infections, sinus infections or asthma?

• 3

  To determine if your toddler has a food allergy, look for the following symptoms. Mild to severe hives, swelling, watery eyes, runny nose, or trouble breathing that arises within a couple of hours of eating or drinking are indicators of an allergic reaction to something they ate. However, some food allergies do not show up right away and cause other problems like diarrhea, vomiting, eczema, upset stomach, constipation, chronic illness & infections.

• 4

  To determine a skin allergy in your toddler, look for skin rashes. Allergy skin rashes may appear as red and inflamed and may be blistered, cracked, crusty or oozing with fluid. If your child has a rash that is painful or itchy, has hives or eczema. What do Hives look like? Red bumps that can vary in shape and size. Can appear as one big swollen area.
  What does eczema look like? It is a rash cause by itching the skin. It can appear red, dry, flaky, blistering and oozing. It should only be found in places that your child can reach to scratch, as it is caused by scratching. The skin allergy is usually caused by, but not limited to, something your child came in contact with such as a plant, chemical and other irritating material that causes the allergic reaction.

• 5

  If you are having a difficult time determining if your child has any allergies, maybe the symptoms are very mild and your own investigations have not revealed a culprit but you just have that feeling that your child is not quite healthy, talk to your doctor about it. Take your child to have allergy testing, where a medical professional performs skin patch tests to detect allergies. Even if you have determined the cause of an allergy, you should still take them for allergy testing to determine if there are other allergies as well as the one you have identified.