How to avoid a Halloween sugar overload: Australian parents share tips
It’s Halloween night. You realise your children have a big enough haul of Halloween treats to transform them into sugar-hyped monsters for the foreseeable future. What do you do?
Guardian Australia has asked parents for their tips – and many recommend you try playing your own version of tricking and treating, or plan a bit of “Switchcraft”.
“I give them a lolly before they go to bed then put them in a cupboard and use them to get them to do something,” says Pip Lamb, who has children aged eight and five. “If you give them an inch, they’ll take it. You’ve just got to be strong about it.”
She does this sparingly so as to not upset her other strategy: “I don’t make a big deal of it – so they forget.”
Other parents have the “Switch Witch” visit their home, playing on Audrey Kinsman’s book The Switch Witch and the Magic of Switchcraft, in which the “Switch Witches of Halloween” visit homes to watch for good behaviour.
“At the end of the night, our son, now six, gets to keep a small portion and the rest is left out for the Switch Witch who exchanges it for a toy,” one parent says.
Another parent, whose two-year-old daughter is allergic to soy and dairy – “therefore every piece of junk food ever produced” – does a different kind of switching. “Yesterday we went trick or treating and I traded her all kinds of stuff for some blueberry puffs and watermelon,” the parent says.
The other choice is to just let your kids “go wild”, one father says. At least, let the children think that’s what they’re being allowed to do.
Related: Too sweet, or not too sweet? Three experts on what to do with all the Halloween lollies
While his children’s backs are turned, he says he scoops out a bunch of sweets from their bag to eat himself later when the kids go to bed, and scatters their share on to the table so they don’t realise the bag is lighter. “I like to get it over and done with,” he says.
Deirdre Brandner, a paediatric psychologist, previously told Guardian Australia that letting children eat what they want on the first and second days of Halloween “manages intensity” surrounding the event.
Brandner also advises discussing boundaries with children about how much they can eat, and storing the lollies out of view.
Kayla Dodd, a paediatric dietitian, recommends Ellyn Satter’s “division of responsibility” to teach healthy eating habits. Dodd previously told Guardian Australia this could be practised by offering a child a choice between a fruit salad for dessert or Halloween lollies with a glass of milk. It is then the child’s role to choose to eat, and how much, from what you make available.
Julia Lamb tested a new strategy on her two-and-a-half-year-old after she asked for chocolate for lunch. It worked so well that she plans to use it again to ration her child’s Halloween haul.
Lamb, who says she tries to teach her child healthy eating habits by not making sweets taboo, filled each compartment of a muffin tin tray with healthy snacks including chopped-up carrots and grapes. In one compartment she put a few sweets.
“She got so distracted by all the different colours and options she kind of forgot,” Lamb says. “I thought she’d just eat all the treats once she found it and nothing else, but she didn’t!”
Another mother, who like Lamb, admits it’s easier to pull the wool over children’s eyes when they’re younger, says: “If your kids don’t realise those weird jelly hamburgers are edible, don’t correct them.”
Her daughter didn’t realise that Halloween lollies were edible until she was nearly five. Instead, she’d come home and play with her of haul of candy bracelets, jelly hamburgers and shiny wrapped chocolates as though they were trinkets.
“We’d then put them away until she asked to get them out again, like a box of Lego,” the parent recalls.
“I found a container of years-old Halloween lollies in the back of the pantry when we moved recently. Those jelly hamburgers do not age.”
