Halloween for many American families means creepy costumes and candy consumption overload. I’ve mediated a whole heap of heated discussions between parents about children’s sugar intake on all of the other days of the year. So you can imagine how intense the swirl of parental emotions around Halloween candy can be!
While there are some parents that have difficulty setting any boundaries around sweets, they are more rare. More commonly, parents are convinced that regular intake of sweets will doom their child to obesity as an adult or that they’ll never learn to eat healthy. Parents worry their child will get addicted to sweets, or that eating sugary foods means they’ll ruin their appetite for "real" food. Some parents are even convinced that sweets should be earned—solely given as a reward for good behavior, and otherwise banned.
Many parents themselves grew up in homes where treats were strictly controlled. I’ve heard stories about playdates at friends’ houses where coveted junk foods—banned at home—were abundant and unrestricted by their friends’ parents. It’s unsurprising that the desire to go to friends’ houses can become more motivated by food than by the friends themselves!
External restrictions don’t help a child develop self-control.
The thing is, the more parents restrict and vilify certain foods in their home, the more likely the child is to whine and beg for them and even try to get them in sneaky ways. Children will resist control, and when that control isn’t present, it becomes a free for all where kids don’t know how to put on the brakes.
As a parent, you’re hoping that control coming from you, which is external control, will create internal motivation in your child to eat healthy. But external restrictions don’t help a child develop self-control. So what can parents do instead? Nutritionist and family therapist Ellyn Satter, the creator of Satter Division of Responsibility in Feeding (sDOR), offers some great tips for parents anxious about Halloween candy.
6 tips for helping kids learn to regulate their Halloween candy intake
1. Unlimited candy on days 1 and 2
Hear me out. Ultimately, you want your child to be able to manage their candy intake independently and responsibly. Kids learn new things by doing those new things, not by you doing it for them. So let them be in charge of their own Halloween candy. When they come home from trick-or-treating, let your kids sort and trade and eat as much of their candy as they wish. Let them eat as much as they want the next day as...
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