I first noticed it after my son’s third birthday party. I had gone a little overboard with the party planning, and we ended up with one dozen extra cupcakes after the big day was over. I thought it would be nice to bring them to church in the morning and have my son share them with his Sunday School friends. They could have a second mini celebration right there in class, singing the birthday song to him and everything!
I couldnât have been more wrong.
When I came to pick up my son after church that morning, I found that all 12 cupcakes remained in their clear plastic container and were sitting on a table outside of the door. One of the Sunday School volunteers shrugged at me apologetically and said, “One of the moms asked that I remove these from the room. She didn’t think it was a good idea.” I didn’t even understand the problem at first. Did the mom think that they were full of eggshells? Laced with poison? The cupcakes were not homemade — they had come from a local bakery and they looked beautiful. What was the issue?
You may have already guessed it, but the issue was sugar.
As I skulked down the hallway towards the parking lot, I could feel the other moms giving me the side-eye and practically shielding their children from seeing the sinfully sweet contraband I carried in my hands. I tried in vain to find a few people willing to take a cupcake or two off of my hands, but I may as well have been peddling illicit drugs or pornography right there within the walls of the church. I went home feeling defeated and abashed. But what exactly was I feeling ashamed about? Ashamed that I had tried to share some treats with our church friends?
The war against sugar only got worse once preschool started. My son came home with a note from the teacher explaining that they love recognizing birthdays throughout the year, and any student who would like to celebrate in class with friends is welcome to bring a fruit tray or perhaps a non-food treat like stickers. A fruit tray?! Where would they put the candle?
A second realization about just how far the saccharin spite extends came later, when I was unpacking my son’s lunchbox at the end of the day. Each day I kept packing him a Little Debbie brownie as a treat to eat after his lunch, and each day it was being sent home in his lunchbox. “Does he not like Little Debbies?” I wondered. When I asked him about it, he seemed unaware that he had even been carrying a dessert around. My suspicions were confirmed when I picked him up early from school one day, right as they were finishing their lunch. The brownie wasn’t even on the table with the rest of his food! His teacher had seen it in his lunchbox and decided to keep it hidden away.
Why is my son not allowed to eat a treat that I packed for him myself? When does the madness end?!
My family and I are not obese people. We like to eat, and we probably over-indulge at times, but we are also very active and we eat a balanced diet. My three-year-old son has more energy than anyone I’ve ever seen. He burns approximately 9,000 calories a day, and I’m not particularly worried about a brownie or a cupcake sticking to his hips. In fact, if there is ever a time in a person’s life when they can load up on sweets without any consequences, childhood is it! As he gets older, my son’s metabolism will change, and he’ll start to face the unpleasant reality of adults — that we are what we eat. He has plenty of time later for counting calories and worrying over whether his food is organic, free-range, and grass-fed. But right now he’s only three. Shouldn’t he be allowed to eat the brownie?
I picked up my son from preschool a few days ago, and an elderly teacher assistant was there — one I hadn’t met before. Our first conversation consisted of her fussing at me about my son’s knowledge of sweets. She told me that when she polled the class, he was able to list more types of junk food than any of his fellow classmates. She tsk-tsked me about how junk food is bad for heart health, and shared her concerns about his diet. To my embarrassment, as this conversation was unfolding, my son was poking around in my bag and found a Saran-wrapped cookie that I had bought for him to eat on our way home in the car. “Oooh…what’s this?” he asked, holding it up proudly. From the look on his teacher’s face, you would have thought he was brandishing a gun. I just shrugged my shoulders and said, “I bought you a treat today for being such a good boy.” Teacher was shocked. I don’t care.
For now, I’m in charge of my son’s dietary decisions, and I’ve decided that a little bit of sugar is nothing to get so upset about.
We do tend to celebrate with food in our family, but life is too short to avoid everything that taste good and has sugar in it! We eat healthy most of the time, but like a good dessert sometimes! Nothing wrong with that I say!
Haha. Thanks, Mom! đ
Sugar is hard. Technology and sugar are my only addictions. I used to wake up at 3am craving sugar. Itâs highly addictive and completely legal, so curbing the addiction is almost entirely impossible for me. My toddlers have pony sweet tooth as well and weâre trying to keep the junk out of the house and save it for holidays and parties as special treats. I completely see why most ppl donât think sugar is a problem, but I applaud the schools for making an effort to keep it out. Good luck!
Thanks for your comment! I have been hearing from people on here and on Facebook who have dealt with very real sugar addictions, even as children, and itâs something that I hadnât really thought about. I donât feel like I have a problem with sugar, and my son doesnât either at this point, though itâs something that we definitely enjoy. But I can see why sharing sugary treats with the entire class could become an issue. Thanks for your perspective!
This whole article is a disappointment. I guess itâs easy for a parent to say my child burns 9,000 calories a day so he can eat all the treats he wants but whose to blame when these terrible habits follow him into adulthood? The truth is that this child will likely end up with diabetes, heart disease, obesity, or worse. This appears to be an article from a parent who found it easier to reward with treats rather than fostering a healthy lifestyle. Furthermore it shows a lack of nutritional knowledge or care about how sugar changes and impacts children. Come on Knox city moms blog you can do better than this! We are not in the 80âs anymore. Know better do better! Especially for our precious children.
Such a rude comment! You can disagree with an article without being so nasty about it and making assumptions about her child. That’s uncalled for.
Itâs upsetting to read your prediction that my son will turn out to be obese or have diabetes or heart disease. I certainly hope thatâs not the case. You may be picturing our household as the likes of Mama June and Honey BooBoo, but thatâs not how we are. We enjoy sweet treats at our house, but we also understand portion sizes and how to balance out junk food with healthy food. I feel like Iâm raising my son (nutritionally speaking) the same way that I was raised. When I was growing up, organic-everything wasnât a trend. I ate a good mix of veggies/fruits, good home-cooking, and sweet treats. I havenât ever suffered with obesity, diabetes, or heart disease, and I hope that my son doesnât either.
Personally, I try to limit my children’s sugar intake because I am very addicted to it and I am hoping they won’t grow up to be like me. I’ve struggled with my weight since I was a small child and I’m hoping to help them avoid that future. However I do give them dessert after dinner almost every night and of course when we visit Memaw they eat enough candy to hype them up for hours. I don’t think you did anything wrong by sending cupcakes to church, but I also understand why other parents didn’t think it was a good idea. If my son had a cupcake during Sunday School, he’d be bouncing up to the ceiling for the next two hours.
Thanks for that perspective, Andrea! I definitely have learned since that incident to be more cautious about treats. This past week, I made sure to ask my sonâs preschool teacher if he would be allowed to distribute candy with his valentines for his classmates, and she allowed it. I know that every parent is different on this issue, so when it comes to bringing treats to share with an entire class, Iâve learned that I just canât make any assumptions!
Kids get a lot of sugar every day already – naturally occuring sugars in fruit are one thing, but then you add a yogurt cup and they are near the limit of added daily sugars. I do not want my child being fed a cupcake at school. That is not what he is there for. There are healthier ways to celebrate birthdays, such as bringing a favorite book or sitting in a special chair during lunch. Food used as rewards are not appropriate and can lead to disordered behaviors with food later in life.
I understand your perspective of not wanting cupcakes at school. I was looking at the âbirthday wallâ in my sonâs classroom, and I realized that there were multiple birthdays listed for most months. Some months had four or five birthdays, and if those kids bring in treats for each of their days, that adds up to a lot of cupcakes at school. I even feel birthday overkill in the workplace sometimesâit seems like there is always cake in the break room, and that can be an unnecessary temptation sometimes. But cake is the traditional way that we like to celebrate birthdays, so there has to be some sort of appropriate venue for itâat the birthday party at the very least.
I donât necessarily agree that food as a reward is a bad thing. When we started out potty training my son, the most sure-fire way to convince him to use the toilet was to offer him some M&Ms. Once he started getting the hang of it more, and I realized that he was going to be eating way too many M&Ms all day long if we kept it up, I switched to a sticker chart. He would get one sticker for each successful go, and after he accumulated 5 stickers, he would get some kind of treat. I feel like thatâs reasonable, and I donât feel like Iâm creating a monster by allowing him to indulge in treats for good behavior, as long as treats arenât the ONLY reward.
I just finished a fascinating book called In Defense Of Food. I felt wonderfully vindicated in my opinion that there really arenât too many real foods that are bad. We just 1) eat too much! 2) eat processed food!-too much-! Sugar is not the devil, just as fat is not the devil. Too much is the problem. Americans suffer from an over abundance of just about everything…
I feel the same as you about occasional sugar, but with childhood obesity on the rise, I think it is important to be aware and respectful of other parentsâ goals to limit their childâs sugar intake. You never know what kind of predispositions theyâre already trying to prevent.
Studies have shown just how addictive sugar is and when I looked at my own family, it was alarming just how addictive it really is.
I definitely didn’t want to step on other parents toes the day that I brought those cupcakes to Sunday School! I wanted to a) give my son a chance to celebrate with some of his church friends who couldn’t make it to our party and b) get those cupcakes out of my house so that I wouldn’t eat them all. I think I was just surprised that I WAS stepping on toes, because I hadn’t even considered it! Lesson learned!
We all have the right to teach our children what we wish about nutrition and to feed them as we see fit. A treat now and then is no big deal. But I also want to be the one to provide the treat from time to time and sometimes it feels like i can’t blink without someone else giving my kids junk food. When my oldest started kinder, there were 20 plus kids in a class bringing birthday treats and multiple teachers that would hand out candy. Not to mention “snacks” after sports that are often cookies or cupcakes after 15 minutes of actual exercise. It all gets to be a little much. I couldn’t have been happier when the school put an end to the birthday treats. Yes, sugar was much less regulated when we were kids, but now we know better. There is solid research on the risks of high intakes of sweets and other highly processed foods as well as the consequences that can arise from too many food based rewards. As a society, we are not doing too well with promoting good health for ourselves or for our children and our history of food as the way to celebrate and reward ourselves isn’t helping. So feed your kid however you want but don’t be surprised if others don’t share your views.
If there is one thing I was sure of, it was that other people may not share my views from this post. đ
“Sometimes it feels like I canât blink without someone giving my kids junk food.” That is one of the best comments I’ve seen.
Our society constantly rewards kids (and adults) with treats. When I go to a bank or dry cleaner, and they offer my kid a sucker for walking inside…Makes me want to scream, they don’t “need it”.
My child’s first sucker was after getting a hair cut, when the stylist just unwrapped it and handed it to him without even asking me. I felt like I lost my chance to decide, because of course, he just popped it right into his mouth.