Dear Emily,
How much, if any, of your young child’s Halloween candy are you allowed to take or secretly give away if you don’t want them eating candy every day until Thanksgiving? My son just turned 4, and last year there was a weeklong fallout after trick-or-treating. We tried to limit how much he ate the night of and in the days after, but there was bargaining, “just wanting to look at it,” lots of sneaking. Extra meltdowns. We encouraged him to give us a piece whenever he had one, which worked super-well the year he was 2 but worked less well last year. Not unreasonably, he wanted to see me eat the candy he’d so generously handed over, but I didn’t always want Sweetarts at 7:30 a.m. I also have an almost 2-year-old who I’m sure will be a total candy monster this time around; last year, we gave her a bite-size Snickers and she was delighted for like a half-hour.
What should we do here? My husband thinks it’s okay to secretly pilfer candy, but I don’t. We could try the “switch witch” solution, where we buy stuff to trade with our kids for candy, but it just seems like one more thing to do as a parent and then you have another toy around the house. There’s also something kind of sneaky I don’t like about it. I remember how much I loved Halloween candy as a kid and obsessed over my stash and sorted and re-sorted it. I don’t like the idea of tricking my kids into giving it up, even if it’s technically a “trade.”
But we have to try something. Tell me what I should do this year so my children’s Halloween joy is not my headache for the next week and a half.
— Sincerely,
Can I Just Have One Right Now?
Dear Can I Just Have One Right Now?
Every kid is different when it comes to candy, it seems. An informal poll of my colleagues revealed that some kids enjoy having the candy, treasuring its abundance and making it last long past Thanksgiving by interspersing it with what one editor referred to as “house desserts.” Other kids are much less attached to the candy itself: For them, it’s about the process of getting the haul, visiting as many houses as possible, and stuffing a giant sack, less about the end result. In fact, another editor’s kid didn’t even notice his dad was offering to lighten his load and then secretly circling back, dumping the candy his son had collected in his own house’s treat bowl and recirculating the candy throughout the neighborhood. It isn’t called trick-or-treat for nothing.
Your kid is a third type: a little Augustus Gloop who just really wants to eat the stuff. This is understandable! Candy is engineered to be maximally delicious, and we can hardly blame kids for being powerless to resist, especially when they’ve made the effort to go out and get a whole big pile of it — they’ve earned it with their own labor!
But it’s your job as a parent to set some limits, and it sounds as though the candy has been a real source of tsuris in your household before. If you’re even considering the switch witch, things have gotten pretty dire. Apparently, the switch witch is a very recent addition to the pantheon of imaginary characters parents lie to their children about, à la the tooth fairy and the Easter Bunny. She seems to have originated in the mid-2010s in — where else? — Utah, and there’s a children’s book about her. What she does is allow you to keep a few treasured pieces of candy, then put the rest in a bag. In the morning, the bag is gone, taken by the witch, and in its place is a toy. To some, this may sound reasonable. To me, it sounds like theft. You’re right, there has got to be a better way.
Because my own kids have always been more into getting and having than actually eating their Halloween hauls, I asked Claire Zulkey — the best mom I know and the author of the invaluable parenting newsletter Evil Witches — to weigh in. She has a no-nonsense approach to motherhood that comes from raising two boys, one of whom has ADHD, and reporting to and about a boisterous community of fellow parents who call themselves Witches (no relation to the switch witch).
“It can be helpful to talk about loved ones’ favorite candy if you’re thinking about giving some of it away. Paul’s teacher loved Almond Joys, so he gave her all of his. Maybe it’s cute to set aside candy to donate to the fire station or to give to your postal carrier,” she suggests. This is a little bit gentler than the switch witch and helps your kids have a sense of agency when it comes to deciding how their excess candy gets disbursed. The bottom line, Zulkey says, is that candy is delicious and it’s normal for kids to crave it. “But I think you gotta be the boss of your own house and kid and not wring your hands too much over executive decisions,” she says. “If you’re drowning in byzantine rules or the candy exchange rate, just throw or give that shit away. Good news: The holidays will be here soon, so there will be more candy.” Ha ha.
Remember my colleague’s kid I mentioned earlier who stretched out his candy stash by switching it up with “house desserts”? My kids get dessert (typically, chocolate ice cream or chocolate-chip cookies) after dinner every night, regardless of how much dinner they’ve consumed. In the post-Halloween weeks, that dessert is typically replaced with three pieces selected from their candy stashes until they get bored of candy and start asking for ice cream again. Do your kids get dessert every night? I know there are probably lots of people who will disagree with me about this — and I’ll probably be hearing from them very soon — but I think if you don’t do daily dessert, now may be a great time to start. If they’re assured of getting some sugar every day, maybe it won’t become such an intense fixation. (Or maybe it still will!) Oh and one other thing: The “eating a piece of candy whenever he does” thing seems like a bad idea for all kinds of reasons, namely that my stomach turns at the idea of having to eat Sweetarts at 7:30 a.m. If you can’t manage to save the candy just for dessert time, try using it as a bribe. Put on your shoes? Then you can have the Sweetarts. Candy is for closers.
Finally, one approach that’s sneaky but not in a pilfering way: Cut off the candy at its source by curtailing the amount of time your kids spend trick-or-treating in the first place, thereby limiting the size of the haul. Overcompensate if necessary with promises of staying up late to read a spooky book or watch an episode of Super Monsters while eating some outlandish but not barf-inducing amount of candy, like five pieces. Then put the kids to bed and put the candy away someplace where they can’t see or reach it. You’re in charge of candy dispersal now. You are the only ones with the power to distribute candy. No, he cannot “just look at it.” The weeks to come will still be a pain in your ass, and there will be begging and meltdowns. But if you’re firm about how much candy gets doled out and at which times, at least it’ll be slightly less bad than last year.
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