Why You Should Eat Halloween Candy With Your Kids

One of the most common questions parents ask me is how to help their children develop a positive relationship with food and their bodies. These parents have slogged through decades of diet culture and know how much unhappiness has resulted from their own war with their bodies and their fraught relationship with food. Can they help their children avoid their despair?

If you want your child to have a good relationship with food and their body, Halloween is the perfect time to act on those hopes. Here are some Halloween do’s and don’ts:

Don’t moralize food.

No food is inherently good or bad, and yet our society so often wants to sort everything into this binary. Aside from the obvious, the other indication that food doesn’t hold morality is that it’s hard to find a food for which everyone universally agrees on its level of perceived “goodness.” For every person who would categorize watermelon as a good food, someone else thinks it has too much sugar. Bagels were considered a good breakfast food in the 90s, but now many consider them bad because they have too many carbs. Eggs, tuna, bananas, and cheese constantly swap sides on the health trend pendulum, precisely because food itself is morally neutral.

The problem with labeling a food is that it quickly labels the consumer. “I was so bad last night; we barely got any trick-or-treaters, and I ended up eating way too much candy.” If you think your kids aren’t paying attention, ask yourself: where exactly did you learn that candy was bad? When did you start feeling bad for eating a Snickers or an Almond Joy? This Halloween, don’t moralize candy. It is not junk food or sugar; call it what it is: Halloween candy. And don’t judge yourself, or others, for eating it.

Don’t punish yourself (or others) for eating candy. Eating is not deserving of punishment.

• “I ate so much candy, I need to go to the gym.”
• “I was so bad at that party, I had so much junk food.”
• “I’m skipping breakfast after eating my son’s candy last night.”

We know this logically for other people, but we seem to forget it for ourselves: nothing bad will happen if you eat Halloween candy on Halloween. Your kids will not magically wake up with diabetes. You will not wake up weighing significantly more than the previous day. Eating candy, without punishing ourselves, models trust in our bodies and breaks the myth that there is a perfect way to eat.

Embrace food as cultural and fun.

Thanksgiving is mashed potatoes. My birthday is dirt cake. And Halloween is candy. Talk about which candy you enjoyed the most as a child. Delight in watching them sort and trade candy. Taste test the different chocolates. See if you can guess the Skittles color by taste. Food is so much more than food; use Halloween to model how food can be fun.

Remove the sense of scarcity.

While many of my friends remove all Halloween candy from their house on November 1st, or allow only one piece per day, our house is a relative free-for-all. My kids can have as much Halloween candy as they want, whenever they want (and I get full access to any peanut butter cups). And do you know what horrible thing happens as a result: nothing. I don’t see a behavioral change from the sugar (and neither do researchers).

Once, my son got a stomach ache, possibly from the candy, and that’s a normal part of life. But what happens most reliably is that, in March, I inevitably throw away a bunch of leftover Halloween candy sitting in the pantry. It may not be true for every family, but for many, the lack of scarcity means you neither deify nor demonize any particular food.

Eat candy.

You. Yes, you, the parent. You may not yet have a good relationship with food or with your body, but you can fake it ‘til you make it! I cannot overemphasize the power of seeing your parents happily eat candy and have a good time. Model the relationship you want your kids to have with Halloween candy.

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