To want my children to stop eating sweets biscuits and other rubbish!

[toddlerdays]

My children are aged 3 and 4. We eat 3 balanced meals a day, and I make sure they get their 5 portions of fruit and veg every day. I mean proper portions, not including fruit juices in this.

We have fish 4 times a week (not fish fingers!), and almost everything is home cooked from scratch. I hope this doesn't sound like a 'well done me' so far, I'm just trying to paint a picture.

Now we also have McDonalds maybe once a fortnight, and maybe once a fortnight dinner is spaghetti hoops on toast because it's been one of those days.

For snacks the kids have something about 4 o'clock, a packet of mini cheddars, couple of choc biscuits, an ice cream. They do get treats and are not deprived of sugar by any means. When they go to a party (which is almost a weekly occurance with all their nursery friends), I just let them eat biscuits and grapes if that's all they want to eat.

Why oh why do they behave as though they haven't eaten for a week when someone offers them a biscuit, sweet, chocolate or crisps? I mean they literally would finish the packet given the opportunity. And if I ever try and remove a biscuit or sweet from them the reaction is a full on melt down.

I don't get it. Other children seem happy with 1 or 2. Or they're not interested at all. My children will finish their sweets at a party then look for someone else's to eat!

I really want to change this. Do I stop giving them treats altogether so they lose the taste for it? Or carry on as I am giving them 1 treat a day, maybe 2 at the week end? I've been working on the premise that if they never have junk food they'll want it more.

And those parents with children that can say no to sweets, how do you do that!?

I explain to the kids which foods are healthy and which are not so healthy. I say things like "carrots have vitamin A which helps us to see in the dark". I'll also say that we shouldn't eat too much of the non healthy foods like sweets etc.

I don't think I'm obsessive about food or have a bad relationship with it (I generally eat whatever I fancy and don't diet). I am interested in food though, and want my kids to know what's good for their bodies/brain and what isn't.

It's frustrating they don't know when to stop with the sugar/ salty snacks. They are still very young however so the self regulation perhaps hasn't kicked in.

Still very dubious about letting them have sweets/treats whenever so that they're not seen as a treat and they can take them or leave them.

The kids I see that don't eat very well (by this I mean they won't eat veg, won't sit and eat a meal at lunchtime), are the ones who seem to always have sweets in their hands! If sugar is addictive surely the more you have the more you want?

What Hully said.

DS was always sooo embarassing at parties - stuffing his face with as much as he possibly could. He is now much more restrained (11) and makes sarky comments about his mates packed lunches

Yes bigtillymint, been there re the parties comment!

Did you give your DS sweets freely or restrict them?

You know how heroin addicts never say, "Ooh, just a tiny bit of heroin for me this time, please?" Well, that's what children are like with sugar.

HTH.

When they were little, they had sweets/chocolate maybe twice a week, but sometimes more depending on what they were doing (and whose birthday at school, etc!) Now they buy as and when they want (and are pretty restrained compared to their friends on the whole) and I usually get them a bar each week. However, they nearly always have a pudding for afters at tea-time

my kids are not that bothered about sweets on the whole (can't understand it!) and will eat half a portion of ice cream and then say they've had enough (completely mystifying....) but one would eat salty snacks until the cows came home, the other is more of a bread and cake fiend, and neither of them are exactly great at eating a good diet (trying to get vegetables into them is extreeeemely difficult)

So when you look at these 'other children' who seem happy with one or two sweets, you're getting a snapshot; you don't know what their actual weaknesses are or whether their overall diet is half as good as your kids' diet is.

I think a lot of this may be down to genes. My eldest (now 12) is one of those children who will eat half a biscuit and refuse sweets or chocolate. However he is addicted to salt and I really don't know where it comes from. I very rarely add to salt to food (apart from chips (!!)) but he will happily slather anything he eats
in tons of salt if I don't stop him. It really is bizarre.

His brother on the other hand (8) will eat a wide range of things. He is a bit of a sweetie/biscuit monster (loves icing off cake but not the cake) however also loves olives and gherkins!!! I just let him have everything in moderation.

My Dc go and fetch themselves snacks whenever they want them. They dont tend to ask. (age 2 and 4). Sometimes they'll choose biscuits or chocolate, but they are equally likely to fetch themselves fruit or something healthy. I was quite impressed with dd the other day, she went to a party and filled up on the carrot sticks (completely her choice) rather than diving in for the cakes. Although if she had wanted to fill up on the cakes I wouldn't have had a problem with that, it is a party after all. I think allowing them to self regulate does has some benefits, but I completely understand that may not work for every child.

I wouldn't go for the 'just help yourself' to whatever you want either- they can't learn if you don't teach them.

I tried an interesting experiment with my 4 year old a few months ago: for the first time ever I didn't restrict crisps - I let her have them whenever she asked for them. She asked for them every day for a week or two and then simply stopped asking. Now she eats them twice a week. I am sure it's because she no longer considers them a treat. She loves fruit and eats that, by her own choice, far more than crisps. Also, she self- regulates her crisp intake and will often not finish a pack. I'm going to try it on chocolate and sweets next.

BsshBossh I wonder if the result of the experiment was influenced by the habits you had already ingrained from previous restrictions. So were your results due to a) the natural balance she would always arrive at as it happens to be her innate inclination to eat few crisps. b) because any child with unlimited access would cease to desire them when they are freely available. or c) the experiment would have different results if it had been conducted at a younger age when good eating habits were less well established already...

hmmmm - interesting. Maybe we could use the MN cohort to expand the experiment to a larger scale, as a giant online laboratory, to see if we can replicate the outcome and analyse the results.

I agreee exotic - they have to learn that some foods are a treat to enjoy, but not to fill up on on a daily basis, IYSWIM!

BsshBossh, I work with children and eat my lunch with them. One boy used to go mad for vegetables and salad, and refused crisps, etc when those with packed lunches offered. The reason he gave was that he eats them all the time at home.

I don't like to make a big thing that some foods are deemed as treats whilst others are not. It seems to make the 'treat' food more desirable and the 'non treat' food less desirable. The help themselves thing has worked well with my dc, obviously guidance is offered along the way of the choices they make, but I think mine have regulated themselves pretty well with this approach. But again, what works for one isn't always the right thing for another.