If You Give Them More Sweets, They Will Eat Fewer Sweets...And Other Dumb Advice
Why an "Abundance Mindset" lacks an abundance of common sense.
This is a guest post from Alec Liddle. He’s a fellow graduate of the Camperdown MFA program, and you can subscribe to his substack here. If some of his terminology feels a bit off, forgive him. He’s from Ireland.
We are having trouble with our children stealing sweets.
Almost every day, we find an open or empty plastic wrapper stuffed behind the sofa cushions or tucked into a desk drawer1. A packet of buttons that belonged to another sibling, marshmallows hidden away in a high cupboard to be given as treats after dinner, whole bars of cooking chocolate. Most ridiculous of all was after I purged the house of all confectionaries, we caught them standing on the kitchen counter taking spoonfuls of sugar from a mason jar.
It’s a problem we didn’t anticipate, but we’re dealing with it; nothing consistent discipline won’t solve.
However, we discussed this issue with friends who informed us that the root of the problem, which I had assumed to be good old-fashioned original sin, is, in fact, that we restrict our children’s access to sweets.
Pardon?
You see, by hiding the sweets away, reserving them only for certain times, distributing them only with parental permission, we are putting the sweets on a pedestal. We are making them forbidden, mysterious, a golden idol that children will go to Indiana Jones levels of effort to obtain. We have inculcated a “Scarcity Mindset” in our household.
On the other hand, if we were to adopt an “Abundance Mindset” and provide our children with free and unfettered access to sweets, they would lose their glamour, become less desirable, and our children would self-regulate their consumption. In effect, if you want your children to eat fewer sweets, you should give them more sweets.
This is the dumbest thing I have ever heard.
It was a shock to discover people I knew, people I had thought to be sane, could believe this nonsense. Have they not met any human person? Do you know what would happen in our house if we were to buy more sweets?
I would eat more sweets, and I’m an adult man.
They also apply the same logic to things like screen time. Why not drinking? Send your alcoholic uncle off on a six-week cruise with a free bar and he’ll learn to self-regulate. Seems unlikely. What about marijuana use? Funny enough, everywhere cannabis has been legalized, consumption has increased2. And pornography. Goodness knows its increased availability hasn’t caused any problems3.
Related: You Can't "Live and Let Live" If You Want a Functioning Culture.
Think about it for all of ten seconds. Who is going to eat more sweets: the child living in a house with unrestricted access to an abundance of sweets or the child living in a house with zero sweets?
The “Abundance Mindset” is More Common Than You Think
None of this type of thinking was original to my friends. No, there are others who believe this. Why? From where springs this madness?
As far as I can tell, it stems from a fundamental misunderstanding of Supply and Demand. These Abundance Mindset Parents seem to think Supply and Demand operate in inverse proportion. If supply decreases, demand increases, but if supply increases, demand decreases.
Except this isn’t how Supply and Demand works at all.
They are the two factors that determine a third: Price. If demand is fixed, then an increase in supply will result in a decrease in price. If supply then decreases, the price will increase. Likewise, if supply is fixed, then increased demand will increase price, and decreased demand will decrease price. It’s Economics 101.
The problem with all this Abundance Mindset drivel is this: children do not desire sweets because they are scarce; they desire them because they are sweet.
You may take a child’s demand for sweets as a constant. The sliding factor is supply. That is what you have to work with. The child can’t eat more sweets than you give them. At least they can’t eat more sweets than you have in the house.
But what about price? Well, on a basic economic level, it doesn’t factor in — your kids aren’t buying sweets from you. But a parent may still impose an artificial price structure by means of punishment. Whether it is loss of privileges or the wooden spoon, the child should know there is a price to be paid for taking sweets without permission.
Who Gets to Decide the Correct Amount of Sweets?
I could accept the argument that a child who is never given sweets (low supply) would risk a more severe punishment (high price) to steal a treat4, but “no sweets” is not what I am advocating for. I think it’s fine for parents to give their children a reasonable amount of sweets, but the person who decides what is reasonable should be the parent, not the child5.
A child will eat sweets until they make themselves sick. I know, I’ve done it. More than once, because I was a child and I didn’t learn my lesson the first time.
Of course, in the end, a child will learn to self-regulate, but limiting their sweet consumption to “not so many that I’m sick” still allows them to eat way too many sweets and suffer the long-term consequences.
Our nine-year-old ruined, ruined, three of his baby teeth before we caught on to the extent of his stealing. He was stockpiling sweets under his mattress and eating them at night after he had brushed his teeth – the absolute worst time to consume anything sugary.
We discovered all this after he complained about a serious pain in his tooth. He had a cavity that had become infected. After a few courses of anti-biotics and a major disciplinary crackdown — full sugar ban, supervised teeth brushing, prison-style bedroom searches — his dental problems haven’t progressed further, and healthy adult teeth are pushing out the ruined baby ones.
There is also obesity to consider, and children who were not breastfed are at particular risk. Formula is not as nutrient-efficient as breastmilk, and infants have to consume more to get everything they need6. This means they get used to feeding past the point they feel ‘full’, and as they grow, their ability to gauge when they have eaten enough is suppressed.
Childhood obesity is a major problem7, but not a complex one. A large part results from a significant number of children who don’t know when they’re full being given access to too many sweets.
What About Self-regulation?!
It's true that, at some point, our children will have to learn to self-regulate. Some day, they will be adults, and their consumption of sweets, alcohol, and screen time will be their responsibility.
But if we want them to set reasonable limits on their own behavior, then they have to learn self-control, and we, as their parents, have to teach it to them while they are still children. And while they are still children, what and how much they consume is our responsibility. We decide what are reasonable limits, and we enforce them. We can’t ask our children to do our job for us.
iF yOu GiVe ThEm MoRe SwEeTs ThEy WiLl EaT fEwER sWeEts.
Give me a break.
Why don’t they just put the evidence in the bin? Even from a practical, thieves’ point of view, hiding rubbish in other places makes the theft obvious, but we probably wouldn’t notice an extra wrapper mixed in with the rest of the trash. Of course, we’re not going to tell the kids this.
Porn usage increased 310% between 2004 and 2016, according to this study: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8888374/
But this, too, seems unlikely. A child unfamiliar with the taste of sweets is less likely to desire them than a child well acquainted with the flavor and accustomed to getting what they want.
And I don’t buy into all the internet guilt/shaming nonsense that placing restrictions on consumption will give your child “issues around food” and lead to them developing eating disorders. Reasonable restrictions are just that: reasonable. Eating disorders are the products of unreasonable attitudes about food — both unreasonable restrictions and unreasonable license.
Breast milk typically contains 22 calories per fluid ounce, the most popular formula brands contain 20. A six-month-old requiring 700 calories a day would need 31fl.oz of breast milk but 35fl.oz of formula. That’s almost an extra fluid ounce per feed every day for formula-fed babies.
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