I have one kid who doesn't like sweets. We started him with things that had sugar when he was about 2 -- occasional muffin, cookie, etc., mostly when out and about. At that age he decided he did not like frosting, chocolate, ice cream, or candy. He's stuck to it now for four years pretty steadfastly. There are some desserts he likes, such as pie, muffins, cookies . . . but mostly he gives his sweets away to friends. I decided I am not going to fight it! Makes things a lot easier with the dentist.

The younger one does seem to have more of a sweet tooth, although was exposed earlier so who knows where it will go. He is 2 now so no Halloween candy.

Anonymous wrote:Mine are grown now. We didn’t have a “policy”. As long as they ate heathy meals, I didn’t limit the Halloween candy. After a few days all the good stuff was gone and they typically started to lose interest. I just tossed the rest.

This.

Anonymous wrote:The New York Times just wrote a piece on this! In a nutshell, the advice was to let them go nuts on Halloween night (or whenever the big night is), then move to having it as part of dessert or snack (at set times). It recommends against the switch witch, but that's not something we do so I'm not familiar with how that works.

https://parenting.nytimes.com/feeding/halloween-candy-rules?smid=tw-nytimes&smtyp=cur&fbclid=IwAR0sIQF0KKO_mv7tU4zcllwx8_0kTY25kUfVMxk6ddy-xdvQn6fO7uWVN-g

OP here— thank you for posting this. We let him eat as much as he wanted on Halloween. And didn’t limit sweets over the weekend, because parties and grandparents were here. On Monday night, he didn’t want to eat dinner, just candy. We said No, you need to eat dinner then dessert. Total meltdown. After getting it together, he had a few bites of dinner. And he picked out a KitKat—that he didn’t eat. But he held on to it and even slept with it. This morning you can feel the melted chocolate. But so adorable he just wanted to hold it.

I posted that I let my kids have as much as they want as long as they want. They have already completely forgotten about it, haven’t touched their buckets in days. by Saturday they were completely over candy.

Anonymous wrote:We put it in a bowl on the counter and the kids had a free for all the first night. They'd have some more the second day and then it tapered off. I never had to make a strict policy. We taught our kids to self-regulate food in general pretty well.

Same here. Two days of lots of candy then it tapered off. Now about a piece a day because there’s pop tarts and stuff around.