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I’ve been at a food blogging conference this week and I’ve had a few people ask me what will happen to my brand once I no longer have toddlers. Well, I already no longer have toddlers and I have no intention of going anywhere!
I will share more about that another day, but with almost every holiday or food situation, I naturally think about how things went in past years when my kids were younger. Or simply, how much harder would this be with a toddler? Because I love sharing tips with the audience right in the thick of toddlerhood right now.
So with Halloween—and Halloween candy—coming towards most of us, I have three things I wish I’d known about handling candy when I was new to motherhood. These are the issues that came up for me each year, especially with my first toddler. The challenges with handling the mountain of candy that were tricky to figure out in the moment…that in retrospect, I could have found a little more ease with.
Note: My goal for this community is that it’s a safe place to talk to parents with similar concerns, so please feel free to use the comment section as a place to ask questions, talk to each other, and air out your worries. I firmly believe, because I know this to be true in my own life, that the more we can lean on each other, the easier feeding our kids can be.
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I have neurodivergent kids, which makes them exceptions to a lot of feeding advice, I feel. They are very much affected by artificial dyes, so much so that we don’t have them in the house and don’t consume them except for Halloween candy and at birthday parties. The younger two are also extremely picky eaters. My oldest will eat anything, which I attribute to us having the time and resources to introduce him to a variety of foods. However, as life got more chaotic, the younger two started reducing the foods that they would eat, and will prefer sugar over anything else, every single time. It’s gotten so bad that they will say “ok I will eat a string cheese, THEN I get a piece of candy.” If I let them have access to an unlimited amount of sugar, they will choose it every time. This is also because their bodies don’t naturally produce dopamine so they chase it by doing dangerous things, watching addictive television/video games (which we severely limit), and, you guessed it, eating a ton of sugar.
How do I help my children with their eating habits when they have lower impulse control, higher dopamine seeking brains, and food rejection due to being on the AuDHD spectrum?
In this case, you would want to talk to someone with specific training in pediatric nutrition and neurodivergent kids so you are getting information that appropriately takes the context of your situation into account. I would ask your pediatrician or an OT if you have one if they know of someone local.
Don’t post my post. It did not come across in the voice I intended it to project. I appreciate your work.
I won’t and I understand. I hope it was clear that I was trying to share my personal experience, offer some context some parents may not have considered, and normalize some of the struggles around Halloween specifically.