Everyone who has spent half a day around kids knows that sugar intake has a very real, strong effect on their behavior and focus. The sugar high and its hyperactivity, the crash and its negative emotional effects... these are probably becoming just a little too familiar and predictable in the fallout from Halloween.
I was prepared to write a post, today, about taking control of the Halloween loot and carefully doling it out in small doses to minimize sugar spikes and crashes... but while looking for some good information on that topic, I actually came across something intriguing. Maryann Tomovich Jacobsen at Raise Healthy Eaters actually makes a persuasive case for letting kids manage their own Halloween stash (within limits). The idea is that by letting kids overdo it when they first get all the candy, it takes that little forbidden edge off eating sweets. For older kids, she argues, letting them totally control their own candy intake can be an extremely useful for teaching them about snacking. After a couple of days, the sugar will lose its allure and it will become a snacktime treat again.
This post was related to a larger series on the Raising Healthy Eaters blog about managing sweets, and though it went against my first instinct I have to say it makes sense. If parents micromanage too much, kids don't get to make their own (relatively low-stakes) mistakes and thus never learn to make healthy, smart decisions in the first place. We can teach by example, of course, but what we learn through doing is always going to be the easiest to remember.
What do you think? Is it worth braving a few days' chaos to let kids take control of their own decisions about sweets for a little while?
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