It’s not hard to refrain from giving our kids tobacco.
It’s not hard to refrain from giving our kids drugs.
Oh wait, maybe it is…
We need to stop giving our kids sugar. It needs to be classified as a carcinogen, because it actually is.
If we as a society already had it in our heads that kids couldn’t have sugar, just like we know they can’t have alcohol, then it wouldn’t be hard.
But it’s the opposite. Sugar instead is used as incentives for kids behavior, for treats “just because”, the centerpiece of every single holiday. Not to mention sugar is added into baby food, breakfast staples and sugar is marketed towards kids to a disgusting degree.
Look, I’m not saying this because I’m a sugar saint. I love sugar. My husband loves sugar. We keep ice cream at home, we love chocolate eggo waffles in the freezer. And my daughter, she is addicted to a crazy degree.
Addi, who is 5, has a sugar stash that she had been hiding from us, probably since Halloween. She has been waking up at the crack of dawn, sneaking upstairs and eating spoonfuls of sugar in the mornings before I wake up. I noticed this week that the brown sugar went missing from the very top corner cupboard, and the bread crumbs lead to this little stash. I didn’t even know that our benches had storage space in them.
I don’t feel equipped to deal with her sugar addiction. Sure, I run group sugar detoxes and can get it out of our house for periods of time, but I am hopeless to the birthdays, holidays, school snacks and treats that I enjoy too. She would eat it all day every day if she could. My son, who is one, does not get sugar at all if I can help it, but that’s starting to change too.
The worst part of the sugar stash find was that she lied about it with such an easy, straight face, for quite some time before we coaxed the truth out of her (because it was sooooo believable that our dog got the sugar out of the cupboard). A new parenting chapter has begun and I don’t feel equipped for that either.
So, I don’t know what to really do about this. Yes, after the holidays I’ll wipe sugar from my house, and just be ok with the occasional treats…but it seems to always make its way back into our lives. It seems like the only way we are going to truly change the health of our future generations is by seeing sugar for what it really is, an extremely addictive drug. Yes, it would be extreme to “deprive” our kids of sugar until they reach a certain age, but the happy medium is almost impossible to hit at this point.
Or else we’ll just keep seeing the diabetes, cancer and other chronic diseases continue to climb. But, the task seems daunting to me.
How do you deal with your kids sugar addictions? Do you think I’m this solution is going overboard? What should we do instead?
