355. Q&A: Should I let my child eat as much Halloween candy as they want?

Dr. Sarah (00:02):

Ever wonder what psychologists moms talk about when we get together, whether we’re consulting one another about a challenging case or one of our own kids, or just leaning on each other when parenting feels hard, because trust me, even when we do this for a living, it’s still hard. Joining me each week in these special Thursday shows are two of my closest friends, both moms, both psychologists, they’re the people I call when I need a sounding board. These are our unfiltered answers to your parenting questions. We’re letting you in on the conversations the three of us usually have behind closed doors. This is Securely Attached: Beyond the Sessions.

(00:41):

Hello. Welcome back to Securely Attached. So I have been fielding a lot of questions this week, DMs from parents on Instagram, questions from patients in my practice, and I’ve just been part of lots of chats with friends at Halloween parties last weekend, all about the very real pressures of Halloween candy.

(01:07):

And so today on this very special Halloween Eve, I am going to record a solo Beyond the Sessions q and a episode just in time for the candy holiday of the year because I want to answer a particular question that really stuck out to me that I think just really encompasses the complexity that this holiday serves up for parents. So here’s this parent’s question. She writes in, what am I supposed to do about all the Halloween candy? Is it okay to let them go crazy? My five-year-old daughter doesn’t seem to know when to stop. She’ll eat so much, she gets sick, and when I try to stop her, she gets mad or ignores me and keeps sneaking more candy. I can see myself getting frustrated but also nervous because my mother-in-law has a terrible relationship with food and I don’t want her to follow in those footsteps. What do I do? Okay, so this is so the vibe, and I hear in this mom this very legitimate conflict that’s pulling her in so many different directions.

(02:26):

She doesn’t want her kid. She understands that developmentally this kid is not able to inhibit the impulse of doing something that just feels good, tastes good. She doesn’t have access to her breaks. And so mom understands developmentally, I am her external regulator. I got to hit the brake for her. I’m the holder of the boundaries. I have to keep her from getting sick. That’s part of my job, right? Totally. It’s also this other conflict that she doesn’t exactly say this, but I’m pretty sure this is embedded in this. I know this is true. It’s like there’s competing information, there’s conflicting information out there about how we’re supposed to handle this holiday and how we’re supposed to handle sweets and food. And on the one hand, good parents, good parents are going to be supporting their child’s healthy relationship to fruits and vegetables and all these good foods.

(03:26):

And we don’t want our sugar’s bad and it’s not healthy, and I got to keep my kids safe and healthy. And then at the same time, we’re also getting this messaging that, and I think that that’s legit what I just said. And this is also legit. It’s our job as parents to select the food they eat, but it’s their job to decide what they eat and how much of it and when they’re done. And that could be really confusing for parents because if a kid is wanting to eat candy and they never feel done and they don’t know how to read those cues because those foods are designed to be to bypass normal satiety cues, then that’s confusing. And then there’s also this really important messaging that again, I think is good, important messaging and not wrong that we don’t want to shame our kids around food and what they, what feels good to them.

(04:32):

We don’t want to create a restrictive attitude around food that labels certain foods as bad and others as good. That’s going to sort of lead to a lot of shame around eating, shame around enjoying foods. It can lead to more hiding of foods. It can lead to complicated relationships with food and all that kind of stuff. So I hear in this ham’s question, this subtext of I’m trying to navigate what I think I’m supposed to do, and at the end of the day, I’m still stuck at a party fighting with my daughter because she’s freaking me out the amount of candy she’s eating.

(05:22):

And I think one, I just want to normalize that that’s really normal. I don’t think that, I mean, I have those same questions when my kids are just scarfing down candy. I’m like, this is not going to end well in the moment. But I also know it’s not good for their bodies and I know that that’s not the relationship I want them to have with candy if that were every day. I also kind of am of the camp and I’ll tell you guys what I do. Not that it’s right or wrong, honestly, I’m experimenting. Most of my parenting is a long-term experiment, but I try to be of the attitude of what’s the aggregate. I like to think of parenting in the aggregate. So if I were to have an attitude around unlimited candy every single day of the year, that’s just not in the aggregate going to be a sustainable lifestyle choice that leads to health and healthy relationship to food.

(06:28):

And I really like to look at things like holidays as outliers in that big giant data set of the full year. And the reason why I do that is because one, it’s unavoidable and I don’t want to deal with the stress that would come from having to micromanage and police the food that gets served to them on these holidays. Remember, if we go back, and I sort of talked about this a bit ago, but I didn’t anchor it in the research, but there’s a very well studied, well validated kind of gold standard approach to food and developing feeding relationships with kids. It’s by a nutritionist. Her name was Ellen Satter, and she basically came up with this method. She has a book called Feeding, I think it’s called Feeding with Love and Good Sense. But she talks about this thing called the division of responsibilities, which is I as the parent, it is my responsibility to decide what gets served and when it gets served, and also to some degree to manage the environment in which food is served.

(07:53):

And it is my kid’s responsibility to decide of the things that I serve them, what gets eaten, what they choose to eat, how much of it they eat and when they’re done. And generally, again, in the aggregate, if generally we follow those kind of rules and principles, guidelines, I guess in thinking about what’s my job? What’s not my job, what’s my kid’s job, what’s not my kid’s job? Generally in the aggregate, that kind of works out pretty well. And so on a day like Halloween, I might think of it from that framework as by default, by being at this Halloween party or by going trick or treating basically the food I am serving them. And that might be the food I’m allowing them to have access to in this moment is a boat ton of. So then I’m saying that I chose to do that, and then now it’s their job to decide how much of it they eat and when they are done.

(09:07):

Now, if that were it, we would have puking children all over the place. So I’m not actually saying that you let your kid, that you don’t have no role in these outlier events of saying, okay, it’s time to take a break. You can totally set limits and it’s appropriate to do. So going back to this idea that I’m going to look at this day as one of many, it’s an outlier, but I’m also aware that Halloween kind of lasts for a couple of weeks if not much longer depending on how much candy your kids get. So I also am going to remember that there are moments outside of the holiday or the few days in which we’re really going hard on the Halloween candy that I’m going to return back to my normal standard kind of framework around what I choose to serve. And so I want to prepare my kids for that. And this gets into another thing that I think is really important, which is including our kids in the lead up to Halloween candy, what feels good and healthy to them, what feels like important to them, doing a little bit of preparation and some anticipatory planning. Some would call it coping ahead or collaborative problem solving.

(10:43):

And I think that’s a really good strategy. Now, if you’re listening to this on Thursday, you’ve got a day. So today would be a very good day to sit down with your kids and say something like this, okay, tomorrow is going to be such a fun day. I am so excited to see all of the cool costumes and get to see all the fun candy that you get. And I want to make sure that we have a plan for what we’re going to do with all that candy. So I’m not trying to dance around the fact that candy is going to be a point of potential conflict in our house, but I also don’t want it to come down as a unilateral. Candy’s not healthy, it’s not good for you. I’m deciding when we have it how much we can have. And I get to be in charge of this all because if you have a kid, my kids preparation is very helpful, but sometimes preparing kids with my agenda backfires terribly in my house so I could tell my kids what I think is going to happen and what I think the plan should be.

(12:05):

But a lot of times if you have a sensitive kid who’s a little defiant or a little prickly around power dynamics, that can really piss them off. And I think a way to sidestep that is instead of just straight up preparing a kid for what they can expect and what the rules are going to be to approach it more like with collaborative problem solving. And I did an episode on collaborative problem solving with Dr. Stewart Avalon, which was amazing. So I’m going to link that in here because go all into the beautiful ins and outs of collaborative problem solving. But in a nutshell, we’re going to come at it as partners against this sort of external issue challenge that we want to solve together. So that challenge is going to be kind of identified as well. So I know that when we get all that candy one, it’s super exciting, but two, it could be hot, can’t eat it all at once. And so then we have candy in the house for a really long time. And I know that I don’t want to have a fight with you about candy every day. That doesn’t feel good. And I’m curious about your priorities. I imagine you probably want to have some of that delicious candy on a regular basis until it’s all gone. So what seems like a good amount to you?

(13:33):

And you can let them, maybe they’ll say 15 pieces a day and you could say, okay, 15 pieces a day, and you can help problem solve that or troubleshoot that or stress test that. That could actually probably make your stomach feel pretty crappy actually, or might not make room for all the other food that you want to make sure you’re eating. So let’s get to a number that works a little better for both of us. So I do think that one, taking a collaborative problem solving approach to Halloween to the surplus, to acknowledging that neither of us want to be fighting about this for the next couple weeks, but also that you understand that that’s important to them to be able this is theirs. And I do think parents can easily and very understandably get stuck in a trap of wanting to restrict the candy in a way that actually activates a territorialness and feelings of justice and fairness.

(14:38):

That can be really, really derailing of our big goal. And our big goal is frankly, day-to-day harmony, not having to fight about stuff all the time, and generally keeping our kids within the range of healthy-ish food behaviors on a regular basis while also not shaming them or sort of making them feel like they have to hide it in order to have it. Because that restriction culture really, it really actually, the irony of restricting candy is that instead of it nurturing a healthy relationship to candy, what it usually tends to do, and the research bears this out, is it tends to create a lot more conflict in a child’s relationship to the candy, and it relates to a lot more shame around certain types of foods, and it leads to a lot more hiding of certain types of foods. So the thing that we’re trying to avoid is the thing that we ultimately inadvertently maintain or amplify when we get really fixated on restricting.

(16:03):

So those are all some just very concrete strategies I would prepare and collaboratively problem solve with kids about what the plan’s going to be. I would think about this holiday as one of many days of the year, and it’s allowed to be an outlier. Not every day has to be kind of a optimal day because I think that helps us manage our own anxiety. And then another thing I think is really helpful is kind of just zooming out and making sense of any anxieties that we have, and we might be projecting onto Halloween or our kids’ candy intake that may not actually be about our kids at all because this mom says very understandably that she’s kind of getting into a power struggle with her daughter. And that part of what I think is getting her stuck in this power struggle isn’t actually the worry that her kid might get sick.

(17:10):

I know that is a part of this. That’s a legit reason to want to stop your kid from eating a bunch of candy. You don’t want to clean up puke later. But also this fear that there is some way that this eating of all this candy and this access to a large amount of candy is going to impact this child’s relationship to food. And this is the part that I think is a really easy trap to fall into because our anxiety really does want us to connect those two dots. But I actually think that it could be like a self-fulfilling prophecy that the more we worry about our child developing sort of disordered relationship to food, really sort of entrenched unhealthy habits around food and including hiding and sneaking food and not really being able to know, when am I done? When does it switch out of fun and connection and delicious to actually this doesn’t feel good, which is actually I think a product of tuning out our intrinsic connection to our own internal cues, our interoception sort of self-awareness of both our emotions, our desires, and our physical physiology in the moment that actually comes, I think from the power struggle and less about the overeating and overindulging on of the candy on Halloween.

(19:10):

And I think that it actually speaks to a bigger area of focus for this parent over the long run, not on these high potency days, but in the before moments, in the run of the mill moments of most of the other non outlier days, which is helping your kid build that interoceptive awareness. What do I feel hungry? What does that feel like? When do I feel full? What does that feel like? How do I know when I feel done? How do I know when I want something? And how do I give myself permission to want something? How do I know when I want something that does something for my body and gives me energy or helps me build muscles or gives me nutrients that help me stay healthy? That kind of language versus when do I maybe want something sweet? It feels good, or it tastes really good?

(20:17):

Because the thing is food. It is not just about fuel, it is about emotions. And that’s okay. We want to normalize that for kids. We eat to celebrate, we eat to soothe. We want to be aware of that so we can modulate that because if we’re eating a lot to soothe ourselves, that’s a good indicator that the food isn’t really actually doing the trick and we might need something else to soothe ourselves. What are we feeling in that moment? That’s a really important skill to have, and it comes from the conversation that stems from understanding that sometimes we eat as a soothing strategy, and that’s okay. We just don’t want it to be our only tool in our toolbox to help us soothe. And we wanted to be a cue that it’s like an entry level coping strategy that doesn’t really always cross the finish line for us. So we might need to up our skill strategy if we notice ourselves turning to food a lot to help us soothe a feeling.

(21:26):

But the reality is, and especially at Halloween, when our kids think of Halloween, yes, they totally think of candy, but they think of it probably in the context of playing with their friends and sharing in a collective social experience that is fun and exciting and pleasurable and really stimulating in so many different ways. It’s not just about hoarding candy, it’s about comparing what I got and what you got. And it’s seeing what everyone’s doing and it’s doing this activity together of trick or treating and collecting and building territory that is mine. And so when we take it away from them or we approach it from this really unilateral decision-making of, okay, I’m going to take it away now, or I’m going to give it to the switch witch, or I’m going to donate it to people who don’t have it, or I’m going to eat it all mess with you.

(22:32):

I hate that Jimmy Kimmel thing. It makes me so mad. I don’t know if you know what I’m talking about, but I’ll find a clip, but don’t mess with kids. It really pisses me off so mean. But what’s mean about that is that it is messing with this really core basic need of theirs to have a sense of territory. And if we understand that we can work with it rather than against it. It’s not that we have to exclusively give them a hundred percent of their territory and not take any of that. It’s about understanding that it matters to them. That’s all. If we let a kid know it makes sense that you want this, you just collected all of this, it matters to you not just because it tastes good and you want to eat it all, but because you literally just collected it.

(23:22):

You went and mined for this. It’s your gold. I’m not going to take it all away from you, but that doesn’t mean I don’t get a say in how we integrate it into our family life. And inviting them to that conversation is often enough to get them to feel like they still have ownership over their territory. It doesn’t mean they have exclusive rights to decide when and how it gets eaten, but if we understand that need of theirs, that core drive to collect territory, own territory, and make decisions about their use of that territory, we can get a really far with them on Halloween, actually. So I know this is long and a little all over the place because I don’t have Emily and Rebecca here to reign me in and keep me organized, and I’m kind of just going off of my gut here rather than a script, but I think I hit all the points.

(24:21):

So I just want to recap this. Mom is feeling overwhelmed because there’s a lot of conflicting information that’s making her feel like she’s stuck between a rock and a hard place and can’t win because she’s either setting a boundary that makes her child hide the food or feel mad or get into a power struggle with her. Or she feels like she can’t set a boundary that leaves her worried that her child’s going to be sick or develop a really unhealthy relationship with food. And one, I want to normalize that, but two, I also want to reorient this mom to the reality that this is one day in a many, many, many, many days, and it’s totally okay to have outlier days. Outlier days rarely are going to change something as core as a person’s relationship with food. It’s really those chronic, small, repeated messages and experiences that happen this over and over and over again at meals every day all the time.

(25:26):

Those are the ones that sink in. So if those messages are around being tuned in to your body cues, being curious about what you need, understanding nutrition, understanding how to relate to food without shame, if we’re doing that pretty regularly, I don’t think we have to worry about one day messing things up or even a number of days messing things up. But if those chronic messages are actually around, I’m watching everything that you eat. I’m worried about everything that you eat on everything that you eat, and certain foods are really good for you and certain foods are really bad for you. And we’re not talking about normalizing the emotional role that foods play in our lives, that chronic messaging is far more likely to get internalized by a child and over time potentially distort their relationship to food. And that’s the self-fulfilling prophecy that we don’t want to get stuck in.

(26:34):

The last thing I talked about at some point in this mix was some techniques and strategies, just some tactics for Halloween and setting some balance of boundaries and independence and autonomy for our kids in this process. So I hope this is helpful. I hope that you feel like you can kick back a little bit on Friday and any other holiday that involves a lot of sweets and not feel like there’s an imminent threat. And honestly, nothing like a good natural consequence if your kid eats so much candy that they throw up. That’s also something they will learn something from that, especially if we don’t make it a big deal, but we kind of use that as a way to build reflection.

(27:33):

I think that might been too much. Okay, next time we’ll think about that ahead of time. So a lot of work in the before for anything, for all of this stuff, but especially for these high pressure, high intensity days. And also give yourself a break. This is it’s okay for you to have fun. And yeah, just have a really happy Halloween.

(28:05):

Thank you so much for listening. As you can hear, parenting is not one size fits all. It’s nuanced and it’s complicated. So I really hope that this series where we’re answering your questions really helps you to cut through some of the noise and find out what works best for you and your unique child. If you have a burning parenting question, something you’re struggling to navigate or a topic you really want us to shed light on or share research about, we want to know, go to drsarahbren.com/question to send in anything that you want, Rebecca, Emily, and me to answer in Securely Attached: Beyond the Sessions. That’s drsarahbren.com/question. And check back for a brand new securely attached next Tuesday. And until then, don’t be a stranger.