Issues with Sweets- 4 Year Old

I heard a nutritionist one explain that at her house they have dessert nights and non dessert nights. On dessert nights everyone gets dessert no matter how much they eat, on non dessert nights no one gets dessert. That may be a good way to break the habit and cut out some of the sweets.
Hope that helps

We don't do sweets except as a special occasion, and then it is often homemade and sweetened with honey or maple syrup. You might try cutting sweets down to just a few times a month. That should end the struggles. If he is hungry after, offer fruit or leftovers from dinner.

Good luck!

We don't have dessert on weeknights (school nights) & we only occasionally have dessert on weekends. Stop making & buying desserts for a while, offer him fruit for dessert if you want to wean him gently from sweets after meals but let him know that dessert is a treat & not a part of the meal.
If he's asking as soon as he sits down when he's going to get dessert, he needs to quit eating it-he's expecting it, rather than looking forward to it as a treat.

C.,

I'm not sure what's the best way to wean him from dessert, but I will share my opinion and what we do. I am going to go with the moms saying no more desserts. My 5 year old get dessert sometimes, it is never expected and sporatic enough that he doesn't ask for it. There's been a few times that he has told me he is full and done eating, then asks for cookies or something, and I will tell him no, you said you weren't hungry anymore. I don't ban sweets at all, he usually has fruit for snacks, and I love taking him for ice cream after dinner, I get more excited than him! :) Even sometimes for a mid day snack I will give him a couple cookies or a frozen yogurt (they're actually just GO-gurt tubes I freeze and pull out for a cold snack when its hot out. Both of my kids love them like ice cream) its not good that your son is planning his entire meal on how to get dessert. Its ok to give him something sweet as a snack, and that's it. I can almost guarantee he will throw a temper tantrum, and you can calmly remind him he had a cookie when he got home from school, day care, wherever, and that is his sweet for the day. After a few days he will catch on. You can even do it once a week, say Saturdays and make a big deal how its the weekend, that means movie time and dessert after dinner! This way its an enjoyable experience, not an expected one. Good luck!

V.

My family has dessert daily, but nothing big (maybe 2 cookies or a piece of Halloween candy). I figure it's better not to ban it entirely. I also make much of it homemade, so I can put coconut, nuts, raisins, honey etc. in the cookies so I know they're getting something better than oreos. At dinner, they need to try everything, then eat what they want. However, if they don't eat the fruit/vegetable and the protein, then they are "done" and if you are done, then no dessert. (I figure they eat enough carbs without me worrying about it). Hope this helps.

Something I've tried, and which seems to have helped. Not based on any wonderful science or expert advice - simply what has worked at my house. We've disconnected sweets from dessert time. My kids may have a sweet once during the day, period. Within limits (not too close to before meals or bed) I let them choose when. They know that I won't give them their sweet if their "good for your body" food isn't being eaten, but they also know that if they are full from lunch or dinner, they can choose to have their sweet later, after they've burned some of it off.

An added bonus - since I try to practice what I preach, I've been following the same limit, and counting things like soda or sweet coffee drinks as a sweet. And I've lost about 5 pounds so far.

Just give desserts sometimes. If he knows he will get it everytime, he will continue to ask you and eat only what is needed. You can always say "we'll see" when asked if you will be serving dessert. If he eats a good dinner, then you could reward him with dessert...rather than letting him know it is coming ahead of time. And sometimes even if he eats a good dinner, then it is just a day without dessert. Most people don't have it everyday...and it is certainly not necessary. Teach him that it is a treat....and we gets treats occasionally.

I usually tell my kids that if you're hungry enough for dessert you're hungry enough to FINISH dinner first. When they try to get out of eating and expect dessert I just tell them that I cannot give them something else if there is still food on their plate.

I would suggest not giving any dessert at all, then there is no issue.

In our house, we have a dessert every now and then, MAYBE once a month. On special occasions and that is about it. Sometimes we have a "just because" dessert but that isn't often either. As far as any other sweets go, we don't have them. Our girls drink mostly water and milk, they get some cranberry juice or O.J. in the morning but that is all. No soda, none. We have "candy" which is Craisins, dried pineapple, dried bananas, and once a day our oldest gets a fiber granola bar (our younger daughter just doesn't have the teeth for it). We keep crackers, saltines and club crackers on hand as a snack and raisins. But for the most part the only "sweets" our girls get are fresh fruit. No sugary cereals either. Raisin Bran Crunch and Granola and honey nut cheerios and oatmeal. This also eliminates the melt downs in the stores for candy and cereal.

I hope this helps. Meal time struggles must be difficult. I see you are also having troubles with power struggles, if your son gets a lot of sugar during the day that could be the cause of the power struggles. Try cutting back his refined sugar in take a little bit at a time and eventually cut most of it out of his diet (just don't keep any in the house) and see if the power struggles are reduced.

My 5 year old son is like your son too. So, in our house we don't have dessert every night - and it's not planned (it's more like whether I feel like serving dessert or not) so he isn't expecting it on certain nights. And the other thing I do is let him ask once (or twice) if there is dessert, and once I've answered his question he doesn't get to keep asking/bugging me about it. If I've already told him we are having dessert and that he needs to eat his dinner first, then asks again if he's eaten enough, he loses his dessert for the night. That rule did cause some tantrums at first, but he know nows that if he focuses on his dessert rather then eating dinner and spending time with the family then he does not get dessert.

Hi C.,
I don't consider sweets or desserts part of or a necessity after our meals. I have a few sweets around but not many. After dinner, most of the of time we don't even have dessert. So this isn't really a problem at my house. I give my daughter a treat in the afternoon but thats about it. I don't want her to be wired with sugar before bed. It may be difficult to change your dessert routine but I would try to just eliminate the idea of dessert after dinner (especially for the kids). They don't need sugar that late anyway. However when we go to grandma's house she does serve dessert after dinner, but you could just do it for special occasions or maybe only dessert on Friday or Saturday nights?? Good luck with your little negotiator!

Your son is 4 and clearly capable of delayed gratification and reasoning....demonstrated very nicely I might add!!

Since it's an issue then it's time to pull the plug. No more desserts. And when he whines and cried you calmly say it took too much energy out of me to get you to eat enough dinner and all you were focused on was dessert, so guess what, no more dessert! Stick to it. He'll get it. Then discuss with him how his behavious affected you and how you came to your decision on how you're going to handle desserts moving forward.

For us, I never serve a 'dessert' after either dinner or lunch. For meals, it's all about filling up on real food. I will typically only serve a sweet treat (ice cream, cupcake, berries with cream, pie, etc) at snack time. I'm not worried about them getting filled up or eating too much/little. It also gives me the flexibility of giving them something fun -let's stop for a root beer float on the way home from school, yay!- or something healthy or something just to tide them over until dinner. GL!!

We had the same issue with our boys and one day one of them was throwing a fit about it. My husband had finally had enough so he started laughing which made my son scream even more. It was funny so my husband made up a rhyme no eat no treat. Instead of negotiating every day what they were going to eat we decided that they had to eat everything on their plate or there was no treat. It only took one time of no treat when we all went for ice cream to catch on that they had to eat and it ended all the arguing.it even made such an impact on them that when we would have friends over my boys would tell their kids no eat no treat so they ate their meals too. Good luck

I actually just read something about this. How using food as a punishment/reward can make things harder in the long run for their eating habits. What they said was that you should offer the entire meal together at once. The good food and the dessert (maybe just a small portion?), and let the child choose what they are going to eat when. They can start with the dessert even (with no comments about it), and learn to make decisions early regarding their eating behaviors. If he learns that what he sees is what he gets, he won't stress so much about when the sweets are coming. If you aren't offering it after the meal, he won't see it on the table, and let him know that. He will learn that the sweet isn't as filling and may need to finish the rest of his meal later to fill his belly. I have no practical experience with this, but do plan to use this as my son gets older.

Good luck.

It seems to me that by saying to a child that he has to eat dinner to get dessert, the value of dinner is minimized and his negative attitude about it is reinforced. . . kind of like dinner is an unpleasant chore to endure so he can get to the good part. I agree with the moms who suggest serving everything at once or completely disconnecting the treat from the meal.
I have a son who is almost four and we joke that he is a "fruit bat." He, too, loves anything sweet and will ask about dessert. He flits over for a bite of this or that but is just not the eater his older brother is (and I have to tell his older brother that he's had enough lasagna; he doesn't need thirds.)
I've managed to circumvent the cycle of over-sugaring by making slices of fruit dessert. We also had to de-tox from when my parents were visiting and there was a lot of soda around. I can call a dish of strawberries and grapes "dessert" and put it in a cute cup and he is pleased with that as a treat.
I think the parents' job is to offer healthy choices, and he can choose the portions. If you don't feel good about his food choices or preferences, then perhaps it's time to modify his options. I made a casserole a few nights ago my middle child didn't love, but I didn't mind if he didn't eat it all because he ate a huge helping of steamed broccoli--all his options were healthy enough to be acceptable to me.
Three books I have really appreciated and recommend are "Healthy Foods,Healthy Kids" (I think); "The Family Nutrition Book;" and "The N.D.D. Book" all by Dr. William and Martha Sears. The first one is a children's book and talks about green light foods (eat lots) and yellow and red light foods (eat less or almost none). You could find it on Amazon.com. The others are just great references for appropriate food choices for children and helped me a lot. "The N.D.D. Book" is a new book about what Dr. Sears calls "Nutritional Deficit Disorder," which is just a tendency to behavior problems and chronic health problems because of poor nutrition. Reading it really helped me get motivated to help my kids have good choices. All of these books address desserts (which I love) but help you figure out how not to let it rule your family meal times.
Best wishes!

It sounds as if you have a budding lawyer in your home! He has put you into a negotiating position already. Four-year-olds are wonderful!

Maybe you want to re-think the whole dessert thing. (By the way, I LOVE desserts.) When the dessert has become the most important part of the meal, there's a problem. Would it be feasible to drop desserts entirely for a while? If you could do that, then you could concentrate on the most nourishing part of the meal without negotiation/bribery/blackmail/whatever. Once the concepts of meals and sweets are firmly separated, you might be able to re-introduce sweets at the end of lunch and dinner to some extent at a later date.

But if you decide to try this, don't let your little lawyer lead you into an argument or another negotiation (or even a big conversation) about it; just let him know in a firm but friendly way that it's something you and dad have decided. You could say you've concluded it would be better for all of you, and that's that.

You're dealing with two things here. One is, "What is a good meal about?" The other is, "Who is running things?" With a four-year-old, you know this already, of course. Keep your smile and your sense of humor, but be in charge.

I think the more you down play this behavior the better. It could be a good attention getting tactic that could get our of hand. I think your best bet would be to , first of all, provide really nutritious desserts. then it will be ok if he fills up on them. Second would be to not always have dessert. Or, make it clear that the treat is for later, like in the evenimg or a before bed snack.Then he won't associate it with dinner.Dessert is not a necessary thing and could be just on sundays, or something like that.

My two boys LOVE desserts, so what they get is yogurt or fruits after dinner. I let them sometime have something sweet in the afternoon before dinner's time. But, I am trying to get them understand why sugar is bad for them and why they should eat vegetables. I cooked the other day peas knowing that my kids hate that, so we went on line and I was showing them pictures of peas and then telling them how nutritious they are and they started counting the number of vitamins and they were showing interest in the vegetable and how it grows and everything!. My boys are 4 and 3 and half, so they don't know how to read yet, but then they asked me to have peas for dinner!! Good luck!

To lessen the appeal (or comparison) of dessert, I have often served dessert *with* lunch (gasp), and sometimes we even eat a backward lunch where dessert goes first! Sometimes it's fun to get it out of the way, then finish lunch. Then when my kids have gone off to school, I have been confident that they will eat their whole lunch, not just the dessert, even if it's a declared backward lunch day. :) The key is to keep the dessert small enough so they are still hungry. Hope this idea helps!

My middle boy is 3 1/2 and is the same way. He will eat anything sweet and not want to eat regular food. It makes me insane. The only thing I found works is to not connect dessert with a meal. Make dessert a "once a day" special treat. I only allow my kids one dessert per day if that, and it is usually their bedtime snack (sometimes we will sneak cookies in mid-afternoon). I do try to focus on giving dessert at least an hour before bedtime. My hope is in the long run they will have good eating habits when they grow up and not fight the weight demons so many of us wrestle with today.

Hi C.,

I did not have time to read all of the responses, so I hope I am not repeating something.

I read an article about this subject. It talked about how meal time becomes a power struggle for kids. They have so many things that they aren't old enough for or aren't aloud to do, but eating is something that they do have control over. You cannot force them to eat, they are the only ones who can choose. Thus, you take the power struggle out of it. You let them decide to eat or not, but they then have to deal with the natural consequences of that choice, such as going to bed hungry. It went a lot more in to depth, but the basic ideas was that once the power struggle is gone, they will get to the point that they realize it does them no good to not eat, because it does not give them any power over you and only ends up making them very hungry. This only works however if you are calm about it and really let them be the one to make the choice. This is difficult because as mother's we want our children to always do what is right.

We have tried this with our daughter who recently turned 4. She is just often not interested in food and it has been difficult to get her to eat from the start of solids. This has worked quite well for us. She still chooses not to eat sometimes and if she is overly tired then she will still have a fit, but these have decreased and happen very rarely now. I tell her at dinner that she can choose to eat or not, but that she won't get any food later on. I will still let her have a small dessert sometimes (not every day) as this will not give her enough to keep her full. It seems to work better than making her eat a certain amount, because she knows when she is full and I don't want to encourage over eating as this is something I have always struggled with. She will even eat her vegetables most of the time if I don't give her too large a portion of the main dish. I do tell her she has to finish her plate before she can have seconds on anything. The article I mentioned also said that you should make at least 2 dishes that you know they like so that they don't really have an excuse to not eat it.

Sorry to be so long winded. Hope you find something that works for you!

~E.

If it is becoming that much of an issue, don't give dessert after every dinner. We don't do desserts in our house on a regular basis, so there are no questions or nagging about how much has to be eaten before our daughter will get it because she hasn't come to expect to get one. On the occasions we do have dessert, I don't tell her before the meal that there will be one, so she eats her meal and then gets a happy surprise. And if we do have a dessert, it is usually a couple cookies or a pudding cup or something - it is pretty rare that dessert equals cake or pie and ice cream or something of that nature just because I usually don't have that stuff in the house. Good luck!

how about making the size of the dessert proportional to the size of the meal eaten? if a child eats one chicken nugget, and one baby carrot, then a mini-oreo cookie ought to be pretty even. on the other hand, if your child eats an entire sandwich or main meal serving, then dessert would be a similar size, like a nice scoop of ice cream or something. then you're not really insisting that he eat too much, you are just balancing things. it is less like a punishment, you are simply teaching him a sensible approach.

C.
We decided in our family long before we had kids, that dessert is a special occasion and not an every day thing. So when we do have dessert it is a real treat. I have two rules for meals

1. they have to "take a taste" of everything
2. they either take as many bites of each dish as they are old,("you are four? take four more bites") or pick one dish and eat it all.

When there is a dessert, if they have followed the rules they get the dessert too.
I also realize that sometimes bodies and mouths need a little something extra. Especially since we hardly have desserts, I have a jar of small candies, that I collect from Easter and then from Halloween. They can ask for a treat once a day, if it is close to snack or meal time they get to wait until after. But very often I find that they wont ask unless they see someone else with a treat.
This just puts the importance of the "sweets" on the back burner. We try not to make it a big deal by forbidding sweets, or revolving meals around sweets.
If it's you or your husband that needs the dessert, try sending it with him to work in the day and eating it when the kids are not around, you might just find that the inconvenience of it all will detour you both, and you wont really need it after a while.
Above all if you lessen the importance of it, your kids will too.
Good luck
E.

you have lots of responses, I didn't get to read them all so if this is a repeat sorry, but what about going to fruits as your dessert? just cut up fresh fruit. take the sugar factor out of it.
also with my almost 4 yr old right now I've started to just put her to bed at bedtime even if she didn't finish her dinner and not let her have anything else. she isn't going to starve, she can eat at the right time with us.
another approach is to ask him how much do you think you should eat to be healthy and strong? perhaps make a chart that has the number of fruits and veggies he needs in a day on the chart and if he fills that up he can have the dessert? just some thoughts.
good luck!!

Hi C.!

I have a HUGE sweet tooth and one of my three daughters does also. I know this sounds harsh, but don't keep sweets in the house for snacking. You can serve fruit (a little whipped cream is good with it :) or peanut butter, melted chocolate, etc. ) during the week and make Sunday night and holidays special with a really great dessert. No dessert for lunches except special occasions.

Hope this helps,
L.

I did not let sweets become a routine for our family. We do not have desserts on regular basis just special occasions. But I like moms suggestion of healthy desserts he may stop asking after a while. Apple slices with carmel, fruit yogurt, apple pie, those healthy ideas try for a week and then see if he stops asking. My husband and I are both moderate over weight so we decided no sweets before 5 if you establish it they will follow but you have to be consistent. They get so much sweets already and the diabetes and the teeth and health factors are so worth the moderation factor. You will do what your family needs you to do. We are all different look to what you feel in your heart is best for your family!!Best of luck.