Do you have "junk" food in your house on a regular basis?

I don't buy crisps, chocolate or biscuits regularly either (there is however usually a box of icecream in the fridge). There is often some home baking but if my 12 and 15 year old are hungry after school they have some bread and butter/peanut butter/honey or some bread and olive oil, cheese toastie and fruit, yogurt, nuts etc. Then there are good home cooked meals and on weekend homemade dessert. Occasionally (if they have a group of friends coming over) we may buy fizzy drinks or crisps. But more often with friends they will end up making own pizza from scratch or pancakes or similar.

I don't think they are deprived, they have pocket money and can and do buy what they want when with friends. They are very active and eat well, nothing is restricted but I just see no point in having a junk food drawer.
I am from a Mediterranean country, live in NZ now but eat similar to how I did back home.

I do have it in my house, mostly because DH wants it. DC would happily eat nothing but ice cream and chocolate biscuits all day, it's hard.

I often "forget" to buy replacement junk when I go shopping. I also try to make homemade biscuits, cake etc and buy additive free/emulsifer free/high quality stuff like chocolate to make it better.

Always have chocolate in the house dont often have crisps as I have no self control and biscuits only occasionally.

I don’t particularly buy much junk food for the house but we do go to the corner shop after school to choose a sweet treat for the evening :) my son really looks forward to picking a different chocolate each day, it would be easier/cheaper to get some multipacks in but he enjoys it this way and it stops me from bingeing on snacks! 😂🙈

We do have crisps in as he has them for packed lunch and A LOT of healthy snacks - my son prefers the healthy snacks!

I don’t allow any sugary crap for breakfast at all. My son is only 5 so it’s a lot easier to manage as he doesn’t really know it exists or if if he does he’s not interested 😂 breakfast is very similar to yours so egg on avacado toast, Weetabix, homemade healthy pancakes, smoked salmon bagels - he loves it

When he’s older and the novelty of picking a little sweet treat each day wears off I probably will keep more junk in the house though and just hope he eats it in moderation but it gets harder as they get older as they make their own decisions

Right, so we didn’t have any junk or treats in the house until the kids hit their teens – mainly because they kept nagging for it, and then it was a free-for-all. Looking back I wish I’d started a treat cupboard when they were little, so it wasn’t such a big deal when we finally did. My sister did this with hers – a constant little stash of crisps, chocolate, pot noodles, ice cream, cake bars etc – and her two are quite good at not going overboard. I kind of wish I’d done the same!

Bit you are restricting it by not making it available? Our "treat drawer' is stocked with crisps, cereal bars, chocolate etc and once ita gone its gone. The meals they are provided with are healthy and nutritional.

I only shopped on friday and the kids have mainly had fruit bowls with yogurt, I think ive eaten more crisps than them.

I have noticed a few threads on here over the years where treats were restricted/not bought and has then resulted in binge eating etc.

Teaching them moderation or restricting how much they can have is a good lesson.

Out of interest, if you had a family movie night what snacks do you have? Here is popcorn, doritos with hummus or another dip and a big bar of chocolate is favoured here.

In terms of drinks, I never usually bought fizzy unless we were having a bbq etc and they could help themselves until it was gone. Now both favour fizzy flavoured water over coke.

Yes, always have some crisps and biscuits in. Ice cream in summer.

Porridge, Weetabix or unsweetened Musli...

Is building a time machine to go back and prevent my own birth an option at all?

The reason they’d choose the “junk” is because you severely restrict it, call it treats and give it on special occasions like birthdays. If it was treated like any other food, they wouldn’t do this.

I don't believe this.

This argument always gets wheeled out with booze on here (and elsewhere) as well, the thinking goes that a little bit of alcohol with a meal demystifies it and disincentives over-indulgence. I think from personal experience its the other way around. Making anything (whether its junk food or alcohol) normal sends a message that its part of day to day life and that sets children up to see it as part of their world.

Kids who grow up eating ready meals, takeaways and junk food all the time are more likely, not less likely, to choose to consume it as adults. It's no accident that there's a correlation between the normalisation of this food as part of household diets from the 1950s onwards and the huge rise in obesity.

I'm not a diet freak or a faddy eater by any stretch of the imagination -- I think diets are horrible. My kid is prone to eating more junk food than she should and its a constant struggle to incentivise healthy food, so I'm not trying to be smug about this at all. But I do think people saying keeping stuff like this in the house reduces the attraction are not being entirely honest with themselves. The more something is normalised, the more its likely to be tolerated.

We have a snack drawer with crisps, chocolate and biscuits. Our 17 year old son helps himself when he wants a snack. Meals are balanced and healthy but we don’t restrict snacking. We are all active and a healthy weight.

Im 51 now, but growing up my mum has a 'sweetie drawer' and I was allowed to pick something once a week. This drawer was like a golden drawer, a drawer of wonder, a drawer i loved.

Now I struggle with moderation. I left home and realised I could eat chocolate whenever I wanted, and did. I still struggle to eat junk in moderation and I crave it.

I do think restricting something can cause issues in later life.

As a rule I don’t have any junk food in my apartment. Doesn’t mean I don’t occasionally eat it, of course - had marshmallows around a camp fire last night for example! I just don’t want to get into the habit of eating crap so I keep it out my cupboards.

Lots of us didn't.
We certainly didn't eat out the way my children do, or have food delivered to the house or when with friends hanging out.

They are working or in Uni with part time jobs and they have the money for it.
My daughters regularly meet friends for dinner and they are very late teens.
I certainly didn't do that.

I think it's pretty unusual not to have some biscuits and crisps in the house with teens. I actually don't think it's a problem to eat a couple of biscuits or a small bag of crisps most days.

Cereal - we usually have shreddies, weetabix, granola but I sometimes buy a box of the sugary stuff in the holidays - it gets eaten quickly then they go back to the other stuff. DD makes her own pancakes and baked oats!

The reason they’d choose the “junk” is because you severely restrict it, call it treats and give it on special occasions like birthdays. If it was treated like any other food, they wouldn’t do this. I always had and still do a cupboard with chocolate and crisps, nuts etc, I don’t refer to it as treats and I do not ration it or provide it on special occasions. As such my now young adult daughter eats a small amount when she fancies and that’s it, it’s never much, because it was never in scarce supply, it was always there, she was taught moderation when little, and modellled it on how we behaved and we didn’t make birthdays an event where you ate crap as a treat.

I have dd 20 and ds 18 at home along with dh.
I buy crisps and biscuits occasionally but it's not something we always have. Ds is autustic and would eat the lot in one go given half a chance! No crisps or biscuits in the cupboards right now but plenty of fruit nuts and seeds and I make proten bars / pancakes etc Dd is big into sport and healthy eating and ds has a great diet.
We are all going on a road trip in Europe soon and will probably eat more "junk"than usual on the trip. Its nice to have a change and we enjoy crisps and biscuits more when we are not having them all the time.

I always have biscuits, crisps, cereal and fizzy juice in. I grew up on a house where there was no money for “treats” and went nuts when I started having my own money (no pocket money had paper rounds). My DD has access to what ever she wants and to be fair she is an amazing eater compared to my step children who grew up in an “almond” home and went crazy when they had access to stuff here.

I have normal plain shreddies for breakfast in the morning with a little sprinkle of sugar, they're acceptable in my book as they're full of fibre, but taste a little sweeter.

It sounds a bit overly restricted to me, I'd buy a small amount each week and once it's gone it's gone. They are choosing the 'unhealthy' options because currently they are a big treat. It's better that they learn to make the choice for themselves as they grow a little older, rather than you doing that for them. If they were much younger it would be different.

I was always a believer of not restricting any food to them. We had a large deep drawer full of chocolate stuff and crisps. Because it was there all of the time, they would very rarely eat anything from it, my eldest especially, he disliked sweet stuff from a toddler.
Now days in their 30s and nearly 40, their diet is amazingly 'strict' one trains daily and has a diet mainly of meat and green veg, the other one lives mainly on beans , tofu and veg.

I completely agree with you OP... healthy choices at home, anything goes when out and about/having meals etc.

We went through a phase of having lots of lollys in the freezer for DC to help themselves to. They were eaten very quickly and then demanded again for weeks. They weren't a treat any more but an ordinary food. They are so sugary. So we stopped buying then to have in the house. There were protests but I said you can pop to the shop, a 5 min walk, and get one (for a much higher price admittedly) but they mostly don't.
I don't restrict my children's food. I just try to create good habits by not having junk food in the house.

That said we do buy a multipack of crisps and a few packs of biscuits and the rules is that when they're gone they're gone.... no top up shops for junk.

I try and limit crisps to once a week, but during the school holidays I buy crisps, fizzy drinks and sugary cereal. When they go back to school they will go back to crisps once a week, the odd fizzy drink at weekends and boring cereal.

we have made cake and biscuits and frozen them, if they want one they get it out and have it once defrosted. We do buy iced gems or nature valley bars, but they often sit in the cupboard.

I also buy super noodles and pot noodles in the summer, they have those for lunch a few times a week.

lunch tends to be toasties with cucumber and grapes, dinners are made from scratch and they happily drink water or milk.

im sure we could do better, but it’s fine.

No. Nowadays I only by things like that when I'm specifically going to consume them and I try to buy portions just for what's needed.

I have some 85% chocolate at the moment, but nothing else.

I generally only buy crisps if I buy wine, which I'm into my 2nd week of being off of until Christmas.

Although I might see if I can work in the odd glass of red. I normally drink fizzy moscato 😬 the only red I've ever had is tinto de verano.

I will buy junky quick food if having a drink though because I know I won't want to cook/will want to eat shite.

Ahhhh, 💡 What I should doooo is pre cook a curry and replicate a takeaway!

I have a full snack cupboard my 14 year old can have whatever she likes. She has friends who come over and they're not allowed snacks or only fruit and they go mad.

My daughter has a better relationship with food than I do. I wasn't allowed anything so when I started getting money for lunch in secondary school I ate all the crap I could and I was overweight. I have had an unhealthy relationship with food all my adult life and I swing between binge eating and starving myself and feeling self loathing because I ate something considered a 'treat'.

I agree with you OP. We do technically have chocolate in the house, but it's in a sideboard and for the occasional treat. We only buy biscuits when on holiday. We have some ice cream at the weekends.