We’ve used a “sweet budget” with our older kids for about four years. It’s been ok, but I’m not sure I would recommend it. I’m writing it up as a model for others to maybe riff on.
We started it at a time when the kids were getting sweets across many meals and snacks during the day, especially after our four-year-old realized she could spend her allowance on 8 Blow Pops for a dollar.
Some other ways families handle this: not having sweets in the house, or not worrying about how much sugar the kids eat, or happening to have kids who are less interested in sweets than ours were.
Things I’m not sure about
- Does this method increase how much kids are obsessed with sugar?
- Does counting grams of stuff contribute to disordered eating?
- Does limiting sugar in childhood directly help long-term health, or only by affecting habits later in life?
- How bad even is sugar? Basically any summary will tell you sugar is associated with all-cause mortality, dementia, and cancer. But when I read studies there are weird bits like “Unexpectedly, cakes and cookies and soft drinks were inversely related to mortality in diabetes-free individuals.” Or “Unexpectedly, participants in the highest tertile of sweet food/beverage intake had the highest prevalence of normal weight and lowest prevalence of overweight and obesity”. Or “No association was found for the added sugars and sucrose with all-cause, CVD [cardio-vascular disease], and cancer mortality.”
The basic idea
- The kids can have up to 25 grams of added sugar a day, which is the FDA recommendation. As far as I can tell this number is pretty arbitrary.
- This is divided into two parts of the day: they can eat up to 12.5 grams of added sugar before dinner, and 12.5 grams during or after dinner. We mostly eyeball the amount, but we do more label-reading than we did before.
Jeff’s photos of one sweet (12.5 g): table sugar, marshmallows, ice cream, chocolate chip pancakes.
Details and variations
- This doesn’t count natural sugars like in milk or fruit. We do count fruit juice as an added sugar, because our understanding is that it’s similar to processed sugar.
- We don’t count small amounts of added sugar in foods like bread or peanut butter, which we’d find too annoying to track. Jam, syrup, and honey do count.
- No sweets in the half-hour before a meal.
- You can have an after-dinner sweet only if you have eaten some dinner.
- Some occasions have unlimited sweets (Halloween night, Christmas, Easter morning). The rule is: stop before you throw up.
- At birthday parties the rule is that you can have similar to what other kids are having, which will often be multiple sweets of juice, cake, and candy.
- Outings with their grandfather and similar occasions don’t have a sweet limit, but we might require no sweet at breakfast if you know you’re getting ice cream at lunch time with your grandfather.
- After one of the kids lobbied for it, you can now earn an additional half sweet per serving of vegetable or quarter sweet per serving of fruit, up to an additional sweet per day.
- You can’t pool your before- and after-dinner sweets and have 25 grams at once, because part of the goal is to spread out the sugar consumption more across time rather than have it all hit your bloodstream at once.
Health beliefs underlying this
- High sugar consumption seems pretty agreed-on as a risk factor for various chronic health conditions.
- Glycemic index matters; it’s better to have a given amount of sugar spread over time than all at once.
- It’s worth paying attention to sugar even if you’re not prone to overweight. For a while I thought I could eat as much sugar as I wanted without consequence because my undrestanding was that the risk was getting fat and I wasn’t getting fat. Now I’m pretty annoyed at the culture that gave me that belief.
- We’re not that worried about teeth; if our kids got more cavities we’d pay more attention to this.
- We’re not worried about sugar causing hyperactivity.
Good things about the method
- It gives us all a sense of how much sugar is in what foods. Society is not very good at carving reality here — some things are considered part of a meal, like jelly on a peanut butter sandwich or syrup on a pancake, but other things with similar amounts of sugar are considered dessert. Why shouldn’t you choose which you like best? If the child would rather not have syrup on their pancake and have some candy after breakfast, they can.
- If the counterfactual is that your kid can eat whatever sweets they want, this is more hassle. But if the counterfactual is that the kid asks for sweets and the parents need to keep deciding, it does cut down on bickering. Instead of “Whyyyy can’t I have it?” it goes like
Child: “Can I have this?”
Parent: “Well, how much sweet do you have left?” Then it’s just a numeric question: if you have half a sweet left and this candy bar has 9 grams of sugar, you can have two-thirds of the candy bar. - We all get a lot of practice at adding and subtracting fractions, as above.
Bad things about the method
- Our kids view the budget as there to be used, and will get anxious about it if they realize they haven’t had their whole sweet before dinner or before bed.
- One child gets anxious about going over the budget and confesses what she’s eaten when she comes back from a birthday party, even though it’s allowed.
- Other adults find it confusing because the kids want to explain the sweet budget to them, even though we try to make it not the problem of other adults who are caring for our kids.
Using sugar as the vehicle for more nutritious foods
Some foods have a lot more nutrition for a given amount of sugar. My kids are all on the small side, and we’d like dessert to get some protein and fat into them rather than only sugar.
Something like a lollipop that’s pure sugar has no nutritional value. Desserts like ice cream or pudding seem better, both because they have nutrition my low-weight kids could use, and because the glycemic index is lower.
- A favorite dessert around our house is chocolate chips melted with peanut butter in a bowl in the microwave. It’s warm and gooey; it’s good alone or with pretzel sticks, with bananas, or spread on bread.
- Sugar is often the vehicle that gets them to eat more breakfast (often chocolate chip pancakes, or eggy crepes with nutella.)
Getting the most (taste) bang for the (sugar) buck
I don’t count grams of sugar I consume each day, but I informally aim for some budget aiming to maximize enjoyment for an amount of sugar — for me this is largely dark chocolate. My favorite for combination of taste, cost, and sugar quantity are the big $5 bars of Trader Joe’s dark chocolate with almonds.
I don’t want to be judgmental here — thank you for trusting your readers with this kind of topic — but this seems like far too much bookkeeping. I place a lot of weight on the “bad things about the method” that you mentioned, and to that I would add the amount of work that you and your husband do to “enforce” it. As a grandfather, I am lucky — I no longer have to do enforcement, but I *did* have to consciously stop being a patrolman with my grandchildren. It’s a great feeling. The less enforcement you have to do, the more relaxed everyone can be — and stress hormones have negative health outcomes too.
We were talking about the food/dessert topic with our kids over Christmas (I forwarded your last post to them) and I reflected that “dessert” was not a daily thing in our house, maybe not even weekly. My spouse might make jello sometimes or a strawberry or apple pie during those picking seasons, or we might go out for ice cream in the summer. Sometimes there were Oreos or Chips Ahoy in the house. We didn’t budget treats and it never seemed to be an issue. My son would hardly dent his Halloween take each year, though I don’t recall us having strict rules about it (except eat it after dinner). As I told my son, my only regret is doing the “one more bite” negotiating before they left the dinner table — that seemed to be just a parental control thing, in retrospect.
You won’t be punishing your kids if dessert/sweets are not a “course” at each mealtime. The habituation, not the amounts, might be the kind of thing that keeps them consuming sugar throughout life.
Good luck, and thanks for inviting comment.
> there were Oreos or Chips Ahoy in the house. We didn’t budget treats and it never seemed to be an issue. My son would hardly dent his Halloween take each year, though I don’t recall us having strict rules about it (except eat it after dinner).
I just wanted to point out that brains are very different, and if my girlfriend did not have rules she set around her access to sugar, she could eat an entire tin of ice cream in the blink of an eye.
It is absolutely true that rules add tension in reinforcement, but the intent behind setting these rules is justified. We have similar concerns Julia does about sugar budgeting in our own lives, but the budget was originally set for a reason.
Yeah, our experience when we weren’t bookkeeping was that sweets were their default choice many times a day. Some people get around this by not having sweets in the house, but we’re not interested in doing that.
I don’t have much to add but I love this; thanks for writing it. I’ll have to figure this out for our kid someday and I appreciate your thoughts on all the pros and cons of this method.
Right now he’s 1yo and we basically don’t give him any added sugar, but then, we also control all his food so it’s easier now. I’m hoping that, when he makes more decisions, he’ll take fewer than 15 years to realize “oh, if I drink this soda, I feel kind of bad pretty soon after” but I realize how naive that is 😀
Interesting, I think people have pretty different experiences of whether they feel worse after eating certain foods. My experience is that I feel fine basically no matter how much sugar or fat I eat, so I’m relying on cognitive understanding of nutrition more than any more immediate feedback from my body.
Yeah, that’s fair. It’s nice if it works, but I don’t want to rely on “only eat what feels good” because yeah, it’s totally possible cookies will feel good to him. Better to argue about what he can eat, than to argue about what he feels.
Hi! This is a really interesting post, and I have a lot of respect for your parenting!
I just wanted to share that, for me, the answer to “Does counting grams of stuff contribute to disordered eating?” is unfortunately ~yes. Counting things (calories, grams, etc) has usually been the first step toward my obsession and disordered eating. Focusing instead on how food makes me feel, while using some simple not-number-based heuristics, has helped.
Of course this is just one experience, and I may have been otherwise predisposed to disordered eating.
One thing I could imagine being good regardless, though, is presenting the rules in a clearly positive way, like “here’s a strategy we can use to help us feel better/thrive in the long run,” as opposed to e.g. “sugar is bad.”
Thanks for the posts, and best of luck 🙂
This post made me think more about what I’ll do for Jo (7 mos) than I have so far.
My parents had a much more situational approach to sugar. We had dessert Saturday nights, and by default didn’t have any other sweets at home, unless there was something in the house that would go bad unless we ate it. We could have syrup as much as we wanted, but sweet breakfast was weekend only. Fruit juice and jam were unmetered (and we had a lot). At others’ homes, at school, and on special occasions we had as much as we wanted and was available.
As an adult I still keep roughly this policy with a few modifications — I don’t keep sweets around the house, and eat them as much as I feel like when they’re presented to me, or on special occasions (living in your house significantly increased my sweet intake because there were generally more sweets available!). It’s hard to say whether this is because my parents modeled similar attitudes, or because I inherited a genetic lack of a sweet tooth.
I think I’d prefer to do something more like my parents’ approach — the short term advantages of more sweets and more control over sweets seem outweighed by the long term health advantages of less sugar and less metering. One of my unknowns is, if Jo is still spending a lot of time with your kids, whether having a less generous sweet policy than them will be a source of conflict and/or more obsession with sweets. I’m not sure if I’d hold firm and deal with the whining, or switch policies to match yours.
As someone whose parents did this sort of budgeting or incentive system a bunch, I think it can be really easy for this sort of system to build up resentment – my parents got annoyed that I was using the rules and mechanics they invented as something to be optimised to get what I wanted and I ended up resenting every time the rules changed or I got in trouble anyway, or my parents decided I was too grown up to need to be incentivised to mow the lawn or whichever. Relatedly, I think it can have that effect of detaching what you’re doing from the actual reasons for doing it, which is bad but small children are not known for reliably doing things for the right reasons in the first place.
So I guess all I can say is “please don’t get upset at your children for trying to maximise sweets eating under whatever parameters you set, they’re only doing what you asked them to.”
We’ve struggled with this issue ourselves. One trick we discovered was that we can buy Monkfruit-sweetened chocolates. They have 0 glycemic index & aren’t bad in any way (!), although they do cost more than the equivalent that use sugar.
At home we only stock these for “candy” & let the kids have them in the mornings if they get ready for school on time. We also get monkfruit-sweetened “maple” syrup & chocolate chips that we use (alongside bananas & dates) to sweeten desserts we make at home, which we let the kids eat as much as they want once they eat at least one serving of protein during the meal.
Similarly to y’all, we let them make their own decisions about eating sweets at parties & such; the younger kid tends to eat more at these events than the older one, who is much better at self-regulation. Fortunately, parties aren’t typically more often than about once per month or so. And we don’t have nearby grandparents to lavish candy on the kids.
We *have* had to tell friends not to gift us (or our kids) with sweets, which they generally abide.