Handling Halloween

[velvetpage]

How does your family handle Halloween?

Specifically - what do you do about the candy? Do you pool it for family use? Dole it out a few pieces at a time? Let kids keep it in their rooms, to be eaten at their discretion? Let kids decide when to eat it, and accept the consequences themselves, or let them decide with some limits - for instance, no candy before lunchtime? Do you allow kids to have separate stashes of candy that their siblings aren't allowed to have, and if so, how do you handle accusations of theft?

This isn't a big issue for us yet - we're still at the dole-it-out stage, and she doesn't notice if I eat some of her candy. :) But it will start to become an issue, and I want to be prepared when it does.

Comments

[nottheterritory.livejournal.com]

I honestly don't remember how it was done when I was a child - of course I was an only child, so it was alot less complicated. I think I was allowed some limited Halloween night 'binging' but after that, it was one a day or some similar drip type deal.

Certainly we have dealt with past large candy infusions for the Boo by doling it out in individual pieces, one a day - but reading this thread, I am questioning that a little. It's hard to know if the message she's getting is "don't feel you need to eat it all now, there'll still be some tomorrow" or "don't bother disciplining yourself, mummy and daddy will do it for you".

Of course we're desperate to try and not make candy a big deal either, so she won't get to the point where she ascribes artificial value to candy over healthy foods because healthy foods are plentiful and junk is rare (cause that's sure not true in the real world!), but at the same time, she really will skip everything but the french fries in a meal if we're not careful - I don't want to give the fries the lure of the forbidden but I sure wish she'd eat some protein... ahhhh parenthood...

[velvetpage.livejournal.com]

At three and a half, parents have to be fairly involved because she still lives very much in the moment - how she'll feel later has less of an impact. I've started explaining to Elizabeth that eating too much candy will make her feel yucky, so she can only eat a bit at a time, and never before lunch. Over the next few years, we'll start encouraging her to self-regulate a bit, but I don't think I'm going to let her keep it in her bedroom for a very long time yet.