They can have two pieces a day, as a dessert for breakfast, lunch or dinner (1 piece) or as an after school snack (2 pieces). They get to choose. On weekends, they can have 4 pieces.

Once old enough, school of hard Knox. It only takes one stomach ache.

Anonymous wrote:Just 5 or 6 pieces?!

That sounds so boring. My kids ate a bunch last night, and snacked on it throughout the day as we watched movies.

Interesting choice of words. Boring? Is food or candy a way for you to escape boredom?

We let DD eat a few on Halloween night ... didn’t count, but maybe 5-6? Then she can pick one for dessert after that.

All of you counting pieces, you're creating anxious children. You're anxious. You are raising them to be anxious.

It works best for us to let them have as much as they want on Halloween. They usually eat most of it on Halloween, and then we let them have some over the next couple of days and donate the rest. This year we didn't get much because we didn't do regular trick-or-treating, and it was all basically gone on Halloween.

It works great for us because otherwise, they keep bugging us all day to eat candy. I would much rather they eat a bunch in one day and move on. Every year, my older kid says that he wants to remember the following year not to eat so much candy but then eats it anyway. Oh well - we don't give them candy any other time except Easter, so I'm really not worried.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Let them binge - let them have fun and learn to self limit. A pediatrician friend told me it’s better from a blood sugar perspective to have one big spike than lots of smaller ones over days or weeks.

This is us too. I've also heard from dentists that it's better to rot the teeth once than lots of times.

+1. I learned this the hard way with a preschooler and cavities. It made it worse that we’d gotten a lot of tootsie rolls that year as they are much worse than regular chocolate. I later implemented a tootie roll ban.

Mine are 5 and 3. I ask, "how many pieces would make this day special?" This year the answer was 12. So for day-of and next day they got 12 pieces of their choosing. From then on its 2 pieces with dinner as dessert until the candy is gone.

I let them eat as much as they want on Halloween and after that they can have a couple pieces after dinner.

They really do reach their own reasonable limits after a while. I think they each ate 5-6 pieces on Halloween before getting tired of it? And every year, they forget about it before they eat it all (so I eat a bunch or it gets made into cookies or we just dump the stuff nobody likes).

I'm a little surprised other people are so strict with the candy.

The only rule is no candy in the morning..but once DC is back from school then they have a piece for a snack and maybe another one after dinner. If they want to have more they are allowed to. We only stop if they eat too many, which rarely happens. I feel for kids, it's just the excitement about the candy and the fact that they have so much of it rather than finishing it all up. So, we let the kid enjoy it for a week or two, and then figure out how to get rid of it all.

They get to eat only 3 pieces Halloween night, because I don't want them up all night.

After that, it is up to them how much they eat.

They got 2 pieces on Halloween, and one each after breakfast, lunch & dinner on Sunday. Today they are going to each save 2 pieces for next weekend and we are sending the rest to the troops.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Of course not! Letting a kid eat 40 pieces of candy until their stomach hurts is bad parenting.

On Halloween they can pick out a few pieces to eat - 3 or 4. Then they like to play around with it, organize it in 50 different ways, etc. In normal years they bring a baggie of all the candy they don't like to school to trade with their friends, and two pieces to eat.

Two pieces a day going forward.

There have been times when I have eaten A LOT of candy in one sitting, as has my child, neither of us has ever had any stomach issues related to candy consumption.

You've dodged a bullet. But it's still not good to get that sugar high, it's not good for your teeth, etc. You're an adult - surely I do not need to enumerate all the ways eating a lot of candy is bad for an adult, right?

We let them have a few pieces that might and then one or two a day until it’s gone. DH and I eat half of it.

Model moderation so they are not crazy about candy.