Oh what to do with all that leftover Halloween candy?

So Halloween is over but the stash of sweets, jellies, lollipops, candy and other trick-or-treat “goodies” is still hanging around. My #givecashnottrash initiative was popular with all the kids who called to my door but what about my own kids?

This year, for the first time ever, I allowed them to keep pretty much everything they got and to eat it whenever they felt like it. And yes, sometimes I had to hide in a darkened room with my meditation app on loud to avoid watching them stuff yet another lollipop or pack of jellies into their mouths.

“You’re mad”, I hear you shout or “what kind of parent are you at all, at all?”. I know many of you have told me your strategies to deal with the stash from the “switch witch” to eating the lot yourselves! And yes, I am also shouting at myself sometimes (in my head of course - I’m not completely mad!).

However, I have read so much over the past year about how, when we restrict foods for our kids (generally “junk” food), we are actually making them more attractive for them - you know the old adage - the more you can’t have something, the more you want it! The same holds true with our offspring and this is why I have taken the radical approach this year (for me anyway!) to allow them free reign over the Haribo’s and Moam’s.

Ellyn Satter is an internationally recognized authority on eating and feeding in the USA. She says that Halloween can be a learning opportunity and encourages us to help our children manage their own stash because ;

Children who have regular access to sweets and other forbidden foods eat them moderately. Children who don’t have regular access load up on them when they aren’t even hungry.

This loading up on treats when they are not hungry leads to children having issues self-regulating around food of this kind in the future. She suggests allowing the child a couple of days to eat as much as they want of their Halloween booty and then only allowing it at meal and snack times. This helps to normalise “treat” food as part of a normal diet so that children don’t go all hell for leather when they see a bag of sweets.

I REALLY struggle with this concept as I have been totally guilty of being very controlling of what my kids eat in the past. I now follow Ellyn Satter’s Division of Responsibility in Feeding strategy and find it very helpful - I am much less controlling and mealtimes are less stressful.

However, I do think it is also important to try and change the food environment around our children (and ourselves) so there isn’t the prevalence of junk food everywhere. This is what I was trying to do with my recent #givecashnottrash campaign for Halloween, it’s why I teach food education to children, it’s also why I support the Irish Heart Foundation in their campaign to #stoptargetingkids and why I asked a room full of Irish and international chefs at the recent Food on the Edge event to improve what restaurants offer kids.

Back to Halloween - what do you think of this strategy? Would you do it with your children? What have you done with their Halloween stash?