Just like limits that parents set for bedtime, what movies/shows kids can watch and screen time limits, sweets & salty are no different. While you do not eliminate all movies and shows, we should not eliminate all sweets & desserts either.
Develop a family plan for sweets & salty foods. Kids thrive on predictability and reassurance that it will happen. This eases the concern of scarcity that kids will think the sweets & salty foods will never come.
Decide when you would like to include them.
When Options:
- Planned family outing for ice cream, donuts, or other sweets
- Write a family menu for the week and include sweets for certain nights of the week.
- Decide what days to include them in the child's lunch bag.
You do not need to include sweets & salty foods every day and they do not have to always be in your house. In fact, controlling the child's environment by not having them continually at the house is a way of restricting the access without the child realizing the restriction. This is a more positive way than having them continually available at the house and the child feeling the restriction when hearing the no when asking for sweets.
If you are including it with a family dinner, include the sweet or salty food WITH the other dinner foods. Do not save dessert to come out after the meal is eaten. Serve the dessert with the meal allows the child to decide which foods to eat and how much to eat of which foods. Satter's Division of Responsibility recommends that each person has one service of an age-appropriate portion size of dessert with the meal. Keeping dessert at the end of the meal may cause the child to overeat because they want to have the dessert and it places the dessert as a more desirable food than the other foods served for dinner.
