Fundamentals: Helping Kids Build a Good Relationship with Sugar

The Internet is divided when it comes to feeding your kids sugar. On the one hand you have the Almond Moms. Those parents who openly restrict their kids' sugar consumption and criticise their bodies. On the other, you have the anti-diet parents who seem to say ‘FUCK IT’, let them eat whatever, whenever. Then, you have this weird third group, spearheaded by dietitians and kid food bloggers on Instagram, who offer a performative 3 M&Ms in a colourful silicone cupcake case. These parents (usually mothers) have enough self-awareness not to fall into the Almond Mom trope, but haven’t quite worked through their internalised anti-fat bias and aren’t as chill with their kids eating sweets as they let on.

And yes, the dads are conspicuously absent here, even though I know the dads have a LOT of feelings about sugar (hi Thom!).

Unsurprisingly, I gravitate more towards the anti-diet parent camp and am, mostly, pretty chill about what my kid eats. Cookies for breakfast? It happens. A dinner of chocolate and a token grape? Not unheard of.

That said, I don’t necessarily subscribe to the ‘FUCK IT’ part - it’s still important to me that my kid gets the nutrition they need to grow and develop and do all the kid stuff. Even I get twitchy when they’re on cupcake number three. Ultimately, it’s our job as parents to help them meet their nutrition needs.

So where is the line? Between restriction and fuck it? Between Almond Mom/Fake Anti-Diet mum and giving your kid the best shot at having a good relationship to sugar?

As per, I don’t have all the answers, but I have some ideas I want to share with you (and I asked some pals for their thoughts too).

So we’re all straight - this is not a prescriptive five-point plan to train your kid to eat the *just right* amount of sugar. What a good relationship to sugar looks and feels like will depend on each family and their circumstances. I will offer some ideas, but there is no blanket advice that applies to every child, every family, every situation.

And before we get going, here’s your background reading. There are so many common myths and misconceptions about sugar and kids, we need to have worked through them first of all.

What does it mean to have a positive relationship with sugar?

It feels important to reflect on what exactly it means to help our kids have a positive relationship with sugar. Many of us might have clicked on this link with the hope and expectation that I will provide a magic formula to help your kid to eat less sugar, but also not feel restricted. This is the promise of those fake anti-diet accounts at least.

But to me how much sugar they eat is incidental to how they actually feel about sweet foods. Collectively, our relationship with sugar sucks. We shame it. We judge it. We associate it with guilt. We attach it to morality. ‘Oh I’m so naughty for eating this chocolate’. As though you’d stolen a 6-year-old’s entire Halloween stash. We say we’re ‘being good’ when we abstain from it. We have to ‘earn it’, through gruelling workouts, or starving ourselves for the better part of the day. We learn to eat it in secret. We are taught it’s illicit and eat it clandestinely over the kitchen sink or with our head stuck in the fridge so we don’t get ‘caught’.

And then we pass this on to our kids.

This is not anyone’s fault, of course. We all live in a society that is severely fucked up when it comes to food and bodies. We have a cultural obsession with thinness and a deeply seeded fear of fat bodies (which is really a reflection of anti-Blackness).