By following these six suggestions you and your children can enjoy the wonderful taste of chocolate and other candies. The holidays can be filled with pleasant moments of special candy consumptions. The "candy wars" will no longer be necessary.
Instead, eating candy will move from a weight and tooth decay issue to a wonderful time when one can simply enjoy a sweet taste upon the pallet.
Offer your children choices when it comes to candy consumption.
"You can choose five pieces of candy out of your Halloween bag for today and set the rest aside for a different day. Let spread all your candy out and look at your choices."
"You can choose one piece of candy now or two pieces of candy for after supper. You decide."
"You can choose to have your Easter basket candy kept in the kitchen cupboard where we can keep track of it or you can choose to be done having access to your candy."
With candy, remind your children that responsibility equals opportunity. Your children have an opportunity to have some candy. If they are responsible with following the parameters you have set then the opportunity continues .If they choose not to be responsible with candy, they choose to lose the opportunity to have it available. In that instance, access to candy is removed.
This could mean you may have to remove all the candy from the house and make it unavailable to anyone. That would include you.
4. Make the eating of candy something special.
Educate your children that candy is not food. It is junk and has no nutritional value for their bodies. Candy and the opportunity to eat it is something special and are reserved for special moments. Keep candy eating rare and enjoyable. Once the line is crossed and candy becomes an everyday occurrence, specialness of it wears off and it presence is now expected..
Have different candy around at different times to bring attention to the special event that the candy may represent. Focus on the event and how different types of candy are significant at different times of the year. Talk about the cultural or family significance of what a particular type of candy may represent. Change the focus from that of mass consumption to that of significance to you and your family.
5. Don't use candy as a reward.
When you use candy to motivate your children to perform a particular task or behave in a certain way, you are positioning it as a tool of manipulation. Using candy to get children to behave is a form of bribery and produces children who perform for a substance. In this way you end up producing a "candy junky," someone who chases after the next fix of the desirable substance.
Candy should never be used as a reward by parents, teachers, or any professional working with children. This distorts the role candy should have in a young person's life and teaches children that the reward (in this case candy) is more important than the task performed..
6. Help your children create an inner authority.
You are not always going to be present when your children have access to candy. You are not going to be there to enforce a limit for your children or give them choices. You want the ability to curb candy consumption to already be inside them. This control for within will develop in children if you can start early and consistently utilize the suggestions above.
Another way to help your child build inner controls is to debrief or talk through your child's choices with him after he returns from a place where you know candy is easily available. Help him think about and talk through his decisions. Ask him to articulate what he would want to keep the same and what he would like to different next time. Help him create a plan to build on his successes.
Your child's inner authority is the only authority she will take with her wherever she goes Help her learn to trust her ability to decide and make healthy, responsible choices.
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