Should you limit your kids candy consumption?

On The Gee and Ursula Show, hosts Gee Scott and Ursula Reutin solve other people’s problems in a segment called … Scenarios.

More Scenarios: My husband is taking his mother’s side about raising our baby

Scenario: Today’s scenario is an audio Daily Double brought to you by my friends, Rick and AJ, and their kids.

Rick: First, on what to do with the Halloween candy. So the question is, should mommy and daddy put a limit on how much candy you guys eat?

Kids: Yeah! Cause then you’ll get a sugar crash and a tummy ache.

AJ: Should mommy and daddy be allowed to limit the amount of candy you guys get to eat? Should you get to just do what you want with your candy?

Kids: No! … But you can get a tummy ache.

Zoe, of course, did not want to limit her candy at first, and then she said, ‘okay, I’m outnumbered here. Let me go ahead and change my answer.’ So what do you think, should parents limit what kids should be able to eat for candy?

Ursula Reutin: I tried, but I realized also that they naturally will stop at some point when they start feeling a little sick. So I would try to say like, ‘okay, the night of Halloween, why don’t you pick three or four of your favorites.’ But I was not that parent who would say, ‘okay, I’m going to toss away, or I’m only going to give you 10.’ I was not that parent. So by day two or day three, they were kind of done with it, so I think that they were naturally able to kind of limit themselves. My youngest, Eric, was much more of a sweet tooth. And so I would have to work a little harder to get him to stop and it would affect him more. I think you just need to know your kid. I mean, if your kid is going to just be bouncing off the walls all day, all night, and really won’t stop and will eat endless amounts, then yeah, you need to curtail it.

Gee Scott: Because you guys know Chef is the no-fun police, so before he even takes over and has his opinion, let me just say right now, parents should just allow the kids to eat candy. Because the best thing that can happen is they get a stomach ache. Right? And then they had their stomach ache and they say, ‘Mom, Dad, I don’t feel well.’ That is your perfect time to be able to say, ‘see, this is what happens. Do you want to still feel this way? Tommy? Sarah? You want to keep feeling that way? No? Okay, then I’m going to be in charge of the candy from here on out.’ Chef, go ahead and tell the people how you don’t like that plan.

Andrew “Chef” Lanier: How wrong you are? You’re the type of dad that’s like, ‘look, son, I’m going to sit you down here and you’re going to smoke the whole pack.’ Okay, that mentality does not work with kids. I’ve actually tried this with Matthew. We usually do like a big bag of gummy bears in the stockings for Christmas, and one year I said, ‘buddy, go to town.’ And he did, he absolutely went nuts and ate almost the entire bag. After about half an hour, he looks at me in tears. ‘They don’t taste good anymore.’ It lasted about 10 minutes and then he’s like trying to dig through my bag. The thing is, if you’re a child like me, you had no self-control and the reason, by day two or three, you’re done with the candy is not because you’re sick of it, it’s because you’re down to nothing but tootsie rolls and you’d rather eat glass. You got to introduce some boundaries.

Ursula: So what’s the boundary then?

Chef: I don’t know, everything has sugar in it these days. That’s the problem. My son had a Halloween party last Saturday, he had one on Friday with the school, he had one on Saturday, then he went trick-or-treating yesterday. Everything that we have in our cabinets and everything in our stores is all sugar based. So literally, this is an existential crisis for me fighting against the future obesity of my children.’

Gee: What did you allow? What did you allow Matthew to have?

Chef: I think we gave him six pieces and then guaranteed at least another 20 that got squirreled away. I’m going to find wrappers under the couch, in his bed. Yeah, you can institute limits, but they’re going to find a way no matter what.

Gee: I feel like the younger ones get away with much more than the older ones. Parents are focused on the older ones, it’s the little ones that are stashing away the stuff. They’re like, ‘here mom, dad, here’s my bag. But you know what? I got a stash upstairs.’ What do you got, Nick?

Nick Creasia: If you were to ask me or my stomach today, I’d say absolutely give me a limit. Even now, I need somebody holding me back from that bag. But back in the day when I was just a tyke, give me that bag and I may be pulling an all-nighter, baby. How about the day after we’re dealing with a sugar hangover for crying out loud?

Ursula: Well, here’s a question. Should mommy be allowed to limit daddy’s candy intake?

Gee: Never limit daddy’s candy.

Ursula: Sometimes, it’s the adults that are the bigger problem.

Chef: Turn that question around. ‘Honey, I think you shouldn’t eat that,’ because it doesn’t go over well.

Ursula: It doesn’t.

Gee: There is nothing good that can happen when mommy takes away and keeps candy away from dad. Nothing good.

Listen to Gee Scott and Ursula Reutin weekday mornings from 9 a.m. – 12 p.m. on KIRO Newsradio, 97.3 FM. Subscribe to the podcast here.