Treat or Treat! Embracing Halloween Candy

Halloween! A festive event of costumes, community, and candy. While one may think that the scariest part of Halloween is people showing up on your doorstep uninvited, for too many people, the ultimate fright is the influx of candy into their households. They worry about how to control how much candy their children eat, about how everyone will feel with all these extra treats around, about how to explain to their children why they traipsed all over the neighborhood only to be told that they shouldn’t eat their spoils.

It’s telling in our culture how many strategies and programs have evolved to convince children to hand over their candy. Everything from swapping it out for a non-candy sweet from the Switch Witch to sending it off to soldiers in need of a sweet treat overseas to candy buy back programs at dentist offices, how to get rid of Halloween candy is clearly a common concern that many have sought to solve.

The scariest thing about Halloween should not be the treats

As a parent (specifically a parent to a sugar-loving-cavity-prone-child), I get it. It can feel scary, with all the information we get about what constitutes “health” (and how that information seems to conflict), to try to feed our kids. We want them to have fun but we don’t want them to have a “sugar crash” or act out. We want them to be able to participate but we don’t want to harm them with sugar, corn syrup, or whatever the latest “toxic” ingredient is. We want to create lasting memories, but we’re warned against the lasting impact of our kids not “eating clean.”

Amidst all our efforts to steer our kids in a direction that will set them up for success, we also find ourselves grappling with our own fears and triggers surrounding candy and Halloween. Many of us grew up in households where our parents wanted the candy out of sight, or where they dispersed our candy sparingly, or where there was anxiety passed on to us about how much candy we might eat. As a result, a lot of us felt that once we were allowed unfettered access to treats of any nature, our relationship with them wasn’t satisfying or felt out of control. Whether we ate them quickly without enjoyment (as if we ate them fast enough it was like it never really happened) or we felt like we could never get enough, these “treats” weren’t without conflict.

So many of us are determined to raise kids without the emotional baggage around candy that we internalized.

The truth is: when treats, snacks, and sweets aren’t forbidden, restricted, and feared, they lose a lot of their power. A child who is allowed to have a treat whenever they’d like one learns how to listen to their body’s cravings to understand when they actually want one, and has the opportunity to continue to practice that skill throughout their lifetime. Yes, even though we are born knowing how to honor our hunger and satiety cues, retaining that ability over time, through all the noise of diet culture, truly becomes a skill.