Should we give Halloween candy to kids?

Some people think that they can buy kids love with candies, like my mom. She calls me everyday and asks me if I bought my son today some candy. When I was kid she was backing cakes for all of my friends and they thought I have the best mom in the world. Today I'm a sweet addict, I don't won't my son to have such problems but you know, you cannot forbid candies, so it is important to be moderate and to teach kids eat healthy from an early age. ;D
 
Martina said:
Some people think that they can buy kids love with candies, like my mom. She calls me everyday and asks me if I bought my son today some candy. When I was kid she was backing cakes for all of my friends and they thought I have the best mom in the world. Today I'm a sweet addict, I don't won't my son to have such problems but you know, you cannot forbid candies, so it is important to be moderate and to teach kids eat healthy from an early age. ;D

Hi Martina,

Why can't you forbid candy? Sugar is poison. We promote a Paleolithic diet here. You may want to have a look at the Diet and Health section of this forum. Especially helpful are the "Life Without Bread" and "Ketogenic Diet" threads. :)
 
As I was growing up, I remember my mother always would bring home several rolls of dimes and nickles to pass out to the kids on Halloween. (She was a teller at a credit union.) And when I was an older kid, too big to go out trick or treating, I would stand at the front door and pass out the dimes and nickles. The kids seemed to like receiving the money. I remember my mother reprimanding me to only give 2 coins because I would start getting too generous.
 
Moonbird said:
As I was growing up, I remember my mother always would bring home several rolls of dimes and nickles to pass out to the kids on Halloween. (She was a teller at a credit union.) And when I was an older kid, too big to go out trick or treating, I would stand at the front door and pass out the dimes and nickles. The kids seemed to like receiving the money. I remember my mother reprimanding me to only give 2 coins because I would start getting too generous.

That's interesting. I just remembered when I was a kid in southern Florida (late 80s) and my sister and I went to one house and we can pick out one plastic egg from the pumpkin bucket the nice lady was holding. In each egg ranged from a cent to a dollar. It was kinda fun to see what I got each year.

Another house that I recalled gave out one apple for each child. That was the house that no one wanted to go to. :rolleyes:
 
My kid is 5 and we live in a city with lots of Trick or Treaters and he goes to daycare & kindergarten now – there is NO escaping the candy thing and the social pressures.

What I do instead of candy is toys, like one year they were glow in the dark eyeball super balls, the next plastic cars and skulls, and this year an assortment of plastic animals to choose from – thus avoiding the whole sugar-hand-out thing entirely, FWIW. Moonbird, I do that random money thing in those plastic eggs at Easter - works well, those nephews are older now and rather have cash any day! But I might do that for Halloween next year, good idea :)

But I disagree with withholding sweet treats all together (I’m a recovered candy addict myself). I do not want my kid believing that candy is special or desired or earned/reward or any other kind of power to it (or creating a later closet addiction to the forbidden fruit). We use fruit in moderation at home and follow a Palo diet.

I’ve made my peace with the food he gets at daycare & kindergarten – it’s organic and homemade but it’s all vegetarian. I struggled with this a lot (I’m also a recovered vegetarian!). I believe that more harm would come to him emotionally from being singled out at every single communal meal. It deeply hurts them when their peers think they’re “weird,” especially since I’m not willing to lie and say he has food allergies. It’s traumatic and not o.k. in my book. Moderation won’t harm him.

It’s a fine line between building character versus imprinting them with something that becomes internalized as random crazy-making adult behavior - no matter what my intentions are, you run that risk.

What I’ve decided to do about Halloween is to compromise. He gets to eat candy in "unlimited" amounts that night (we do night Trick or Treating here, so there isn’t much time left before bedtime, working to my advantage). He really doesn’t eat that much, and he thinks most of it is quite nasty anyway once he tries a bite. This is great positive reinforcement, a lesson that I’m not cramming down his throat so he owns the experience.

Similar to what someone said above, my kid puts out the candy at the end of the night for “The Great Pumpkin” (with a whole story about the guy) in trade for some gift, this year he got a kid’s Ukulele that he’s been pining for, and a good candy bar that has clean ingredients.

A side story about candy – after Valentine’s Day this year I let him gorge on some junk a neighbor kid brought over. We had been working on him having some say in his life and to work on his sense of responsibility and independence. He (my son) and I both have harsh reactions to artificial colors in food, so I was being an ogre about doling out the candies and it had turned into nagging and other power issues that were getting on my nerves.

So I told him that we could try to see how he did controlling himself and eating them until he felt satisfied – I knew he’d gorge, but I foresaw one of those teachable moments. After a while he easily admitted that he couldn’t control himself and just kept craving more and more and couldn’t stop, and he didn’t like that feeling! He ate until he got a massive headache – the kind where lights & sounds are too bright and too loud. And he got diarrhea. I want to note, he has a low tolerance, due to generally not having that junk in his life, not like he had 100 candy hearts or something and I was sitting around mocking his experience. We talked about how his body reacts to fake-food/chemicals that way and he willingly threw the rest in the trash and we talked about how he doesn’t want it laying around next time because he couldn’t control himself and all around bad experience.

Why let him have it at all? It was quite easy to shelter him when he was a toddler (also before we moved & started at daycare). When he was 3 we moved to a neighborhood with kids in it and the kindly neighbor lady asked if she could give them all popsicles I said no, so she basically had to jerk it away from him as all his dear friends were already sucking theirs down. He immediately threw himself on the concrete heartbroken and sobbing. And you know what, I knew I made the wrong decision – moderation won’t kill him, and we gave him a popsicle. In that example I do not believe I was giving into a tantrum, it was an internal heartbreak, not stomping and demanding that I give him one.

It was an eye opening experience for me about my rigidity and what type of connection I wanted to foster with my son. He & I did talk about why I didn’t want him to have that “treat” – I’m blunt, it’s because they are toxic and make him act out of control (again, a reaction to the colors. As an adult, they put me into a bad, bad mood… took me a long time to figure that out). And frankly, I held it over him, that if he started acting spazy, it would show me that he wasn’t able to eat those things.

I want him to have a healthy relationship to eating and the world around him, one that is not anxiety based.

My compromise is that he gets some once in a while, the power is taken away from it, and I’m clear about how he can eat toxic things occasionally and his body can handle it, it’s ok because he eats so healthy otherwise, he doesn’t have to be afraid of it (he’s asked about diabetes, heart attacks, etc., and we’ve talked about the dietary influences).

Same with wheat/grains, he can have them outside of the home, and we educate him about how we believe it is toxic, but other people believe it is nutritious, including doctors and how that’s a lot of pressure on people. And that he should not bring up why we don’t eat them with other people because they will not understand, will be offended and will turn it into an argument, just be polite (he likes the stuff, so that’s a non-issue with pasta).

We’ve also taken to stocking the freezer of our close neighbors with healthier popsicle options so they don’t have to drop the cash on it (and resent the lecture) and we just gave them a sentence about how colors change his behavior and people can understand and respect that in this day and age. And the neighbors still get a "yes," they still get to do fun things for him in a context that is personally meaningful and fosters a loving connection with him.
 
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