I had a lot of habits at 12, and very few of them are still with me. If she’s cleaning her teeth after, why does matter whether she eats it in bed, in the kitchen or on the roof?! The location of a snack has literally no bearing on anything. What? That’s important. When? Maybe. But Where? Nope!
I personally would hate to get comfy in bed with a book and my snack and then have to get up and clean my snacky teeth. But I’m not doing it. If she’s cleaning her teeth after, the rest is unimportant.
My mother INSISTED I shower every morning before school from 12 years old. My allowance was conditional on it. If I missed one shower, I lost my allowance for the whole week. I hated showers, and I positively loathed mornings. In vain did I plead with my mother to allow a bath before bed, or to shower after my three times weekly 2 hour marital art session. Or to skip when I went swimming with friends. NOPE! She could not ‘get going’ without a shower every morning. So I had to have one too. End of.
Dear readers, I very quickly leant that if I staggered to the bathroom with a token protest, I could run the shower and go back to sleep on the bathroom floor for ten minutes until my sister banged on the door. It was a formative experience for me in all the wrong ways. I was 100% prepared to agree to daily baths. Just not in the fucking morning. And my mother was totally wedded to this INSANE idea that showers had extra-special-magical-pro-morning-anti-teen-stinky-hormone-cleaning-powers that bizarrely ceased to exist after 9am. Mad! Absolutely mad. Clearly they didn’t, because I virtually never had one. She still can’t get her head round me not caring about the shower, but the TIMING (and probably the control as well)
She didn’t care about the water or anything- I had baths as well. I didn’t smell - she boasted to friends about it! I can clearly remember the sting of the ‘this is what I like, so it’s what you will do’ attitude. I can still barley bring myself to shower in the morning, or even at all (love my baths before bed. Or did, before I contracted poverty) and I often wonder how much this is responsible.
If she’d sat down and say ‘hey kid, you need an adult hygiene routine, how do you see that working out?’ And given me some parameters to work within (daily, more or less), and ownership over being responsible for cleaning my own body, I’d bet I’d have come up with ‘bath after Judo Monday, Thursday, Friday. Shower after swimming Saturday. Bath before bed Wednesday and Sunday (there were official chill/early night days), and maybe skip Tuesday?’ I’d have been a lot cleaner, there would have been a LOT less friction, more sleep and I wouldn’t have this weird shower hang-up. (I still hate mornings though. I can’t blame her for that!). It was the dictatorship that was so galling and created a lot of pushback. The frustration of knowing, but not being able to verbalise ‘This DOESN’T work for my body the way it suits yours! I’M NOT YOU!’ Made me feel like screaming, which wasn’t like me. It wasn’t like her, either, she was normally pretty reasonable, and I was a fairly ‘good’ teen with school and chores (a bit wild on the side, but good at hiding it) and we’d generally hammer out an agreement fairly amicably. Just a blind spot over morning showers. I still think it’s the weirdest hill to die on.
This is so reminiscent of that. You don’t mind that she’s snacking in her bedroom. There (presumably) no mess problem. She’s choosing great snacks. She cleans her teeth after. It’s not interfering with her sleep. There’s no digestive problems. All the objective, important parameters are met. Except, for you, the timing. You just ‘don’t like’ snacking right before bed. But her body isn’t yours. Your trying to make it a health and hygiene issue (which is a parental responsibility) and it’s not. It’s just different preference between your different bodies. Just the way a bath at 8pm every 24 hours is no less hygienic than a shower at 6am every 24 hours. It wasn’t a parental-responsibility hygiene issue at all. It was just a very strong, and very personal, preference.
I’m beyond certain you don’t ever want her hiding snacks, or feeling rebellious over them, the way I hid those showers for years. It’s just a piece of cucumber at bedtime. It’s a non-issue.