I’m afraid I’m going to contradict @ParallelLines here. While that approach is great for an adult, I’d worry about the potential for a 10-year-old to start getting obsessed with calorie restriction.
I’d suggest trying to keep your emphasis on food as nutrition, encouraging her to prioritize meals over snacks. If you can get her to eat a non-sugary breakfast regularly, that might help dampen her craving for sugar later. It’s great that she doesn’t drink soda, since that has no nutritional value whatsoever. Neither do the candies, of course, but those are usually available in smaller portions. I’d strongly suggest to any parent - any person, for that matter - to stay away from artificial sweeteners entirely, since they seem to confuse the metabolism at least a little, and it’s better not to start a child on that road.
You say that her doctor and a nutritionist both told you they don’t consider her overweight. You may perhaps be worrying over nothing. If I were in your shoes, I’d try to get her moving a bit more; if there’s some organic way for her to be physically active for at least a short time every day, that might well be enough to keep her growth curve in the healthy range.
I don’t think you’re contradicting me. After all, I ladled on the ‘mights’ and ‘mays’ quite heavily. Or if, I read your comment correctly, you’re more worried about creating an unhealthy body image that leads to various eating and image disorders, which is fully valid concern.
I just wanted to give it as AN option, as everyone responds differently. I was one of those that liked to have a number / goal / budget that let me plan as I said in my post, but it wouldn’t have worked for my brother.
I think we do agree more than disagree! I’m a very numbers-oriented person myself, and being a bit obsessive about calorie counts has been the only weight-loss strategy that ever worked for me. You’re right about my concerns, though. I’d doubt that a 10-year-old who isn’t already concerned about her diet would respond well to it, and given the prevalence of eating disorders among adolescents, I wouldn’t want to get her unnecessarily concerned.
What about teaching her to cook/bake? It’s a way to discuss food/ingredient choices without focusing on weight/health & it might make the subject more interesting for a 10yo. For the next gift-giving occasion gift her a few child-friendly cookbooks & a set of cookware & utensils in her favorite colors. If you can do this at home you can guide her toward healthier dishes and if she doesn’t like one type of cooking, try something else (some people love to bake bread, others enjoy making casseroles).
Even if she wants to make pastries & candy, homemade will introduce her to quality, be more satisfying (& so she will eat less), & can be made much more healthy. There are a lot of delicious pastries/candy you can make that have limited fats & sugar, & without the other scary ingredients commercial products seem to use. Cooking is creative, satisfying, offers a healthy perspective on food/eating, it’s fun, and it’s useful.
If you can find them, mini KIND bars can be a great treat. They are nut bars put together with a sweet drizzle, and some flavors have dark chocolate. I find them to be more satiating than candy bars, because of the protein (and fat) in the nuts. But I’m an adult.
Make fruit crisps for dessert. Do they have sugar? Oh yeah, but they also have oatmeal and real fruit. Instead of serving it with ice cream, pour a little half & half on it which has lower fat than full cream and no added sugar. Teach her how to make them. There’s so much to interest a child in baking and cooking. And all that time they spend making something is time spent on their feet and moving around.
Do not use sweets as a reward. If you all go to a movie, buy unbuttered popcorn, not the boxes of candy and huge cups of soda. Just popcorn. Does she want a popsicle? Teach her how to make time. Again, time spent making them is physical activity and you can add real fruit to them instead of just using sugar and flavored water.
About the concern that she’ll start counting calories. Don’t tell her that is why you are teaching her to cook and back. My mother’s rule was any sweet treat in the house had to be made from scratch by us. That got us learning to cook, with very little intervention from her. What she called treats, was a meal that included exotic food such as shrimp (hey, I grew up far from oceans) or crab. Very rare to be served in our house and definitely a treat.
What else was a treat? Home canned peaches, pie made with fresh apples. We never bought canned fruit unless I begged for it or for a rare fruit salad. However, she made sure that watermelon, cantaloupe, and grapes (they didn’t taste like pure sugar) and apples/oranges were always on offer.
Did all this stop my sweet tooth. Heck no. But when the sugary snack isn’t in the pantry, you reach for whatever is available. I didn’t get into trouble weight-wise until I started earning my own money and could ride my bike to the drug store or Dairy Queen. At that point, the parent may be outgunned.
This. Watch out for high glucose stuff too, that is seemingly designed to make you crave more sweets.
You might consider having her go to a doctor, there may be a reason why she is craving those sweets. I have a BIG sweet tooth, and am going to finally get some full labs done next month to see what’s up. One thing I have found is that if I avoid sweets for even a few days, the craving almost disappears. Then it reactivates when I eat some candy. If I sit around, the craving is high. If I’m very busy, I never even think about it.
To my perspective the issue is the broad one: how do we all deal with living in our obesigenic environment?
How do we teach our kids that their friends doing something, getting something, is not a good reason for them to? That’s an important thing to internalize for future choices to come.
Her not being obese now is fine but the habits matter more.
Simplistic response: the lesson to teach is that treats are treats, special occasion items. Fine every so often in moderation. If other families handle that differently that’s on them. That should be true for our children of all body shapes.
None of those are better or worse per se. And even sweet fruit is fine.
At home the processed sweets are not around and healthy choices and only healthy choices are. Her call whether or not to eat them. No fights. But no junk options. No sweet beverages. And model eating healthily.
Model exercise also and do it together as fun too.
Sorry but you don’t get determination rights on what is or isn’t brought into someone else’s house. But, I do agree with you on the determination of treats. Dessert and sugary snacks fall as treats in my mind too. Not an every afternoon or evening thing. Have a blood orange instead.
Dude! Never mind the OP’s kid, teach me how to do that.
Completely concur with all the advice to avoid setting up anxiety about weight and diet. Focus on healthy less-processed foods, and all the aspects of good relationship with food: treats are for special and not everyday, sweets should be eaten in small servings, you don’t need candy every time your friends are getting some.
OP, how frequent are these outings where “her friends are getting sweets”? ISTM that once a week or so, going out to lunch after the youth soccer game or whatever, it’s fine to treat her to a moderate amount of whatever candy she likes best. (I sympathize with her as I’m a candy-over-pastry gal myself, and one who’s lost 35 pounds in the past 14 months, so I’ve definitely had to think about sensible food choices.)
But if she’s begging for candy whenever her parents stop in a store to buy something, don’t normalize that behavior. Tell her “No, sweets are special treats, and anyway we’re having my blueberry cobbler for dessert tonight”, or whatever. Begging for treats, with children as with pets, is something that they’ll eventually stop doing if it stops working.
And you know, if it’s just a quick stop in a store that’s setting off a snack craving, there’s no law against your bringing a small bag of apples or other fruits along in the car. “Dad-DEEEE, can I have some gummies?” “No, but you can have one of the peaches I brought when we get back to the car.”
Meh. I communicate it differently in the office but helping families develop long term healthy habits so that kids grow up healthy is my daily gig.
Telling parents what to do and to not do if they want to accomplish those goals is my purview.
If you want to help your kids to grow up healthy do not stock crap, even slightly less bad crap advertised as “healthy” in your home. Have a wide variety of better choices about. Teach the good decision making and approach to food that they can internalize when they are out in our obesigenic communities and as adults. That means neither lax nor authoritarian but authoritative limit setting and guard rail placement.
Could have sworn the OP was talking about being out and about where sweet snacks are unavoidably around and her friends are all eating them.
Yeah that WAS the OP.
Bringing candy bars marketed as “healthy” into the home, entraining the child that treats are an everyday thing, undercuts the healthy habit skill building and mindset needed to handle those situations with the mindset of special occasion treat in moderation.
And again, that is the bigger broader point: we live in communities that are obesigenic. The constant presence of those treats around kids, how they are advertised, the social pressure on parents to go with the flow lest their child feel deprived… are all just small aspects of which the big picture we all also are having to deal with as adults, which results in so many of us at risk of avoidable health problems and disabilities.
Factually none of those three is better or worse. The dose and frequency determines the toxicity.
The long term impact is much more in way we deal with interacting with this world and empowering our children with the tools to do so lifelong.
