How to Handle My Child's Sugar Obsession
We often assume that because we don’t necessarily want our child eating too much sugar, we can simply remove it all from our homes or their diets and stop whatever problems we see developing with our kids becoming sugar obsessed.
It would be great if it was this easy. However, rarely is a child compliant with such a cold turkey approach.
With a developmental need for energy and known preference for sweet foods over bitter ones, kids are often drawn to sweets without needing any convincing. Since we know that our children will likely enjoy sugary foods from their first try, I encourage parents to withhold from offering sweets until their child is at least two years old (as much as possible).
That said, many families know firsthand how quickly sugar consumption can get out of hand. Eating well beyond the recommended daily limits, families find themselves with young children who become sugar-obsessed, sneaking sweets, or already aware of good versus bad connotations to such “forbidden foods.”
My Child Seems Sugar Obsessed.
If you have read through my recent posts on how much sugar kids (over 2) can have, handling halloween candy, or best practice behaviors around offering desserts, hopefully you feel empowered in how to healthfully incorporate sweets into your family’s overall diet.
If, however, you feel like you have already screwed up with sugar, I want to speak directly to you here. Your family’s relationship with food - any food, including sugar - is never too far gone. Just as us adults are ever-developing in our own relationships with food (or should be!), we can also better position our family’s feeding dynamics anytime we see problems arise.
Don’t lose hope or keep hidden a habit you don’t wish for your child like them sneaking sweets or obsessing over sugar. The advice already given may leave you feeling like a lost cause after what might have been months or years creating an unhealthy food environment around sugar. That’s why I want to share, I see you and want to work through these concerns with you in a non-judgmental way that hopefully helps you and your family shape healthier relationships to all foods - including sugar.
Revamping the Sugar Relationship
When I polled on my Instagram, “What areas of our sugar conversation do you still have questions about?” after my recent blog posts on sugar, the responses all reflected the same concern:
“Where do I start? I’m already guilty of saying sugar is bad.”
“If I have screwed up and now have a six year old who will whine and sneak candy no matter what, how do I revamp how we approach sugar?”
“How do I keep it from feeling restricted? Do I serve seconds or thirds if requested? My child is asking me for sweets nonstop.”
I am going to break my responses down by the following:
How to handle when sugar has already been demonized
How to handle when a child sneaks sweets
How to handle when a child is obsessed with sugar
How to handle when sugar has already been demonized
Are you hiding when you yourself eat sweets? Did your own mom or dad restrict sugar or fat from you as a child, shaping a negative relationship with such foods since early on? Does freedom towards eating all foods, including sweets, make you feel uncomfortable or out of control?
If you feel inclined to say yes to any of these, there is no shame here. Just a place for opportunity. Chances are, you have been hard-wired to believe there is something inherently bad about sugar, sweets, and other treats.
To help prevent this from being (potentially further) passed down to the next generation, it would be beneficial to consider a few things:
1 Identify which principles of intuitive eating are the most challenging for you.
Often, these very eating principles and food freedoms are also the ones that you are most trying to control in your child. While often well-intended and rooted in “not wanting them to go through what [I] did,” surrendering such behaviors and working through these yourself will help you to role model for your child how to mindfully allow all foods to fit. By trusting yourself to freely enjoy all foods while too practicing self-control towards such foods as sweets, you are better able to extend such trust and control to your child also. This is one of the first steps to giving “permission” to enjoy sweets appropriately in our kids, as they will struggle to be successful with this if they learn to “see food as their parents do.”
2 Drop the language.
One of the easiest traps we get into is giving labels to foods that never needed them to begin with. We assume that by convincing our kids that broccoli is good and brownies are bad, they are going to crave what is good and reject what is bad more instinctively. We know as adults, however, that the opposite is often the case.
Consider, if you wouldn’t do or say it about broccoli, don’t do or say it about brownies. For example, “If you don’t eat your brownies, you can’t have your broccoli.” Sounds backwards from what we are used to, right? You can then limit any added language outside of calling the food what it is. Even labeling sugar as “treats” can be a slippery slope, so try calling a donut a donut, a cupcake a cupcake, and Halloween candy the very candy type it is. Each are foods and while yes, while these are less nutritionally dense than other foods, we don’t need to tie an emotional value to any food.
For families who have long used such language, I am often asked how to stop. Simply stated, just stop. Similar to as if you used to cuss and then decided to stop, it is a process for omitting or substituting more appropriate language for that which was considered to no longer be so. You may still slip up and still say things on occasion, in which case it is okay to correct yourself. Share with your kids, “in our families, all food has value. I didn’t mean to say that [brownies] were bad. I had a lot of fun making these with you. I am going to have mine with a glass of milk. Would you like some milk too?” Then move on and continue to shift how you speak about such foods.
3 Emphasize properties, not perfection.
Beyond labels of a given food being “good” or “bad,” parents often ask me how to talk about food as if something additional should be said to nudge their child towards eating “this” and not “that.” While I always encourage participating in family-wide conversations about topics other than the food itself at the table, I see many families from my Academy who have historically found themselves tripped up over simply saying nothing. Instead, parents often report saying something that may or may not have been helpful in eliminating the stigma towards such foods. If you know yourself to need some sort of talking points (once demonized language has been dropped), consider using cards such as these for conversation starters. By focusing on the physical properties of fruits and vegetables instead of assigning any value that emphasizes perfection in the way one could eat, kids learn to like new foods through a new language. This may help to replace old language with the new, and in doing so, may create a shift in how you think about such foods.
How to handle when a child sneaks sweets
In an excellent article on food restriction, registered dietitian nutritionist Maryann Jacobsen shares,
Rather than restrict a child’s intake, parents need to ask why their child is acting out when it comes to food. It could be a child’s perception of restriction, a lack of structure and limit setting or to avoid difficult emotions. Dealing with the underlying issue will be met with the most success.
When it comes to a child sneaking food, this statement couldn’t be more appropriate. Where as parents we may feel our authority has been violated or scared over such a discovery, sneaking sweets highlights for us as parents that there is a gap in trust that demands more transparency.
To work towards this:
1 Review permission appropriately.
On Halloween this year, I remember seeing one of my daughters stuff a Snickers into her mouth before we went out trick or treating. While we allow them to eat their Halloween candy freely the night of, we do enforce that for safety reasons they don’t eat while running from door to door. Seeing how we were about to go back out, she stuffed a full fun-sized bar into her mouth in one bite. Watching it, there was nothing about it that looked enjoyable. It appeared rushed, uncomfortable, and in misalignment from the manner in which I want my kids to learn to eat and enjoy their candy. As she tried to chew it, I reminded her, “You can enjoy whichever pieces of candy you want when we return from trick or treating. But I want you to take the time to enjoy each piece and find your favorites. Let’s not rush when we eat it or eat it in a way where we could choke. Would you like to spit it out?” When she nodded and I held my hand out, she seemed relieved. She spit it out, took a drink of water, then I put a fresh Snickers on the counter and told her, “You can take time to enjoy this one when we get back.” While this is a more liberal example of our dessert policy in action, I know many of us are finding ourselves in a season with lingering Halloween candy when kids might feel inclined to sneak or hide it - which often happens when our kids are in a haste to eat it without getting caught. When this happens, we want to remind our children of the boundaries in place by our dessert policy that promote trust, control, and overall satisfaction over a sense of restriction in the feeding relationship.
2 Speak to your child openly and honestly
A core principle of Intuitive Eating is promoting what is referred to as, “The Satisfaction Factor:”
When you eat what you really want, in an environment that is inviting and conducive, the pleasure you derive will be a powerful force in helping you feel satisfied and content. By providing this experience for yourself, you will find that it takes much less food to decide you’ve had “enough”.
Going back to the above mentioned point on giving ourselves permission in many of these areas of former food restriction, experiencing satisfaction with sweets is an important skill to work on both ourselves and with our kids. If you find your child is sneaking sweets, open up a non-judgmental, punishment-free dialogue about what is going on. Consider inviting conversation around questions like, “Do you feel like there is something you want that you can’t have? Share with me what is making you feel this way.” or “I noticed some [Halloween candy, cookies, etc.] were in your room when I was putting away your laundry. Let’s talk about this and if maybe when we have sugar is too strict.” While confronting such a finding can be uncomfortable, we can approach the conversation in a way that helps us better understand and validate the motive behind their behavior.
3 Adjust, as needed.
My goal is to limit added sugars as much as possible in families, including my own. However, as I have shared several times, the goal of achieving this is never as important as the attitudes around doing so. So if you find yourself having a conversation similar to those suggested around a child sneaking candy, you may consider liberalizing your dessert policy for a time until their attitude around such foods neutralizes. It may mean giving your child more of a given sweet food at a single sitting or permitting desserts on more days of the week than formerly decided on your dessert policy. However, as Lisa DuBreuil shared on the Comfort Food podcast, “Abundance + Permission = Discernment.” With the goal of helping our children develop an intuitive eating mindset that is able to learn self-regulation, sometimes we need to give them both the abundance and permission they crave with sugar to help them better discern how to healthfully enjoy it - in public and without shame.
How to handle when a child is obsessive with sweets
As a dietitian mom of three, you can imagine that my kids hear A LOT of assumptive comments such as, “Don’t tell your mom I am letting you have this,” or “Does your mom let you eat that?” Additionally, there is a perception that because my kids are a dietitian’s kids, they just don’t like sweets (because you know, I apparently can’t have a sweet tooth either then?!). If any of my kids show a preoccupation with sweets or exaggerated enjoyment in such foods when eating them, there is an automatic assumption that they are obsessed. That said, I have one child whose personality type lends her to be more obsessive about all things - sugar included. I have another child, raised with the same dessert policy and overall parent feeding behaviors, who enjoys sweets but occupies very little of her mental energy on them. This represents how at such “sugar obsession” in children can be real or perceived. The difference I would say is how much of their mental energy and preoccupation is on the food. It is this “relationship with food” that we want to consider here - as healthy and balanced or restricted and obsessive.
As a dietitian mom, the standards for my kids eating habits are assumed to be higher than that of a typical kid. This can create a perceived obsession or perpetuate an actual. This is something for parents to pay attention to, as I myself have had to too.
First identifying how much sugar your child is actually consuming and if they seem satisfied with whatever your dessert policy is would be the first place to start with this. Often, perceived sugar obsessions might arise because a child isn’t exposed to certain foods often in the home that other children are more regularly (as in the case with my child). It is normal for children (and adults!) to enjoy such foods they don’t eat as often, such as less common sweets and celebratory treats. I would not consider that a real sugar obsession and would emphasize such families keep language around sweets as neutral as possible to keep it that way.
A real sugar obsession, however, can occur in children if those less common sweets and celebratory treats begin to occupy and unhealthy amount of their mental energy going into an event or as they respond at the event. Do they show that they can enjoy such foods without sneaking? Eat such sweets intuitively? Demonstrate self-regulation to both start and stop eating it when satisfaction fades? Or is the energy around such foods and eating environments one that is tense, done discretely, and one that exudes more shame than shared celebration and joy? If the latter, parents may opt to loosen up a bit around sweets until their child’s overall attitude and emotional interest in such foods begins to neutralize more.
Here are some things to consider if you think your child is becoming obsessed with sweets:
1 Include sweets on a semi-regular rotation (without being asked for it)
In general, desserts are one of the few foods that fellow pediatric dietitians and myself recommend serving one serving of. By offering dessert with dinner, the sweet becomes a part of the meal just like any other food would be. Being offered at the same time as other foods, it also frees up your child’s mental attention on it by permitting dessert to be eaten freely before, in bits during, or after their meal itself. It is incorporated into the meal and not a reward or bribe contingent on their eating performance (as warned against here). However, limiting dessert to single portion person helps such food not compete with other nutrient-rich options. Instead, offering desserts in this way (per your dessert policy) helps your child see that they will regularly have opportunities to eat and enjoy such sweets without parents needing to worry about dessert being the only thing a child will eat. It may be the first thing they eat initially, but the novelty of this usually fades when children begin to gain trust caregivers to offer preferred foods on a regular basis as part of a structured approach to how all foods fit into a healthy lifestyle. While the amount may be less at a given seating, you may also offer it in larger portions for your child to self-regulate at other eating opportunities such as discussed here. Together, making the frequency and/or amount of sweets being offered a bit more liberal can help your child to be less emotionally or mentally preoccupied with when they will get to have them. Additionally, the fact that you remember your family’s dessert policy and honor offering such preferred foods on occasion helps to reassure your child that such sweets will be offered without whining or begging being required.
2 Share when their next opportunity to eat sugar will be.
If a child does become upset with when sweets are (or more likely, are not!) offered, remind them when their next opportunity to enjoy the given item will be. Similar to the attitude adjustments experienced when an overall Division of Responsibility are adopted, kids who are used to endless access to sweets may initially push back. In some instances, this may warrant a more liberal dessert policy to help them transition into one with more structure and boundaries. Even a sugar-obsessed child however can thrive when such structure and boundaries are consistently put into place, even if there is initial push back. As the parent and one responsible for what, when, and where food is offered in the feeding relationship though, such a child needs to see love with limits set and upheld. Instead of backing down to their whining or endless requests, simply yet confidently remind them, “We will have ice cream on Friday after school. Today we are having strawberries for dessert” (or something along these lines).
3 Observe where their obsession lies.
If your child seems obsessed with sugar, it can be particularly helpful to pay attention to where a child is exerting the bulk of their sugar obsession. Is it over the cupcakes at a birthday party? Donuts at church? The candy other kids have in their Lunchable? Just like adults, each child will have their unique preferences for which foods they really crave. We want to honor these! To do so, consider incorporating them more often so that they see regular opportunities to enjoy these rather than such rarity with the sweets they enjoy that they obsess over them before, during, and after the given event where they are had.
Cupcakes, for example, are a sweet that we personally never have at home because I am not a cake person. I have noticed, however, that one of my daughter’s is. In observing this, I have tried to incorporate them more often (in place of other sweets that I might think to offer in our dessert policy). Some examples of this might be, maybe you bake cupcakes for a play date some time and include them with the kids lunch. Maybe you share one with your child while out shopping one afternoon alongside milk steamers as a girl’s date. Maybe you let them eat them three days in a row after their birthday when there are leftovers lingering. Whatever the given preferred sweet food is, tuning in to what food our children seem particularly obsessive towards can help us to permit that food more often (in exchange for those sweets that maybe they are less excited about). We want to let our children know it is good to be choosy with what sweets they eat and to enjoy them! Consider intuitive eating practices like this to help you and your child identify which sweets actually enjoy and most want to eat. Then, let this observation compel adaptations accordingly so such foods can be regularly enjoyed versus constantly obsessed about.
If you feel like you have already screwed up with sugar
Start today. Seriously, there is no shame in saying, I did what felt right but now I know differently. Today we are going to start making small changes to help our lifestyle and feeding environment reflect what I have learned and how I want my kids to relate to all foods.
With this, you can begin to work through the above tips to begin helping your child who seems obsessed with sweets to embrace a healthy interest and enjoyment of them. Transform your way of thinking about and including sweets as a family, and you will begin to reshape your child’s relationship with sugar one eating experience at a time. This adds up to offering them a lifetime of food freedom instead of unhealthy fixation, and what a gift that is to give them!