Julie Jay: I won’t sugarcoat it — my children eat far too many sweet treats

Whether your kids are eating treats on the daily or indulging only on a Friday afternoon, ultimately we are all just out here doing our best as parents, and isn't that all that matters (my dentist might disagree)

All of this treat talk is, of course, never more intensified than when we face into Easter and pretend that we haven’t secretly been consuming Easter eggs in our car since late February, when the children weren’t looking. Picture: iStock 

A FEW weeks ago, former Love Island contestant-turned-television personality and entrepreneur Montana Brown got into hot water by complaining about children in Britain getting ‘pudding’ every day after their school dinner.

At first, I was stunned to learn that children across the UK are tucking into drisheen every day, before reminding myself that in England pudding is a sweet treat not blood sausage.

The video drew ire from other parents, who pointed out that the pudding may be many children’s only hot meal of the day and that the treat was fairly small.

While Brown was accused of mum-shaming, she was not alone in her opinion on daily desserts, with others chiming in that a sugary treat every day was excessive. While I would err on the side of ‘each to their own’ when it comes to what we feed our children, the controversy did get me thinking about my own family and our love of pudding.

Not so long ago, a friend’s young daughter informed me that her grandparents had a saying: "Treats are not for every day." Although I’m sure this message was delivered with the best of intentions, it did make me a little self-conscious about the emergency Twix that was burning a hole in my pocket.

For the rest of the day, I considered the treat culture in our house. I can categorically say that most days my children have a little something they probably shouldn’t — be it a biscuit, a cereal bar, or a baked treat of some description.

The problem is that we are in the centre of town and so walking anywhere — playground, doctors, or, heaven forbid, the dentist — involves passing supermarkets where treats are aplenty, and mammy’s ability to say no to her children is negligible.

Early on, my eldest son had deduced the way to get around mammy when she is under pressure in retail situations.

Having always told him not to touch the doughnut array — because if we touch it, we have to buy it — at about age three he started caressing chocolate croissants on the basis that, ‘If we touch it, we have to buy it’.

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To add insult to injury, most of the children working in these shops are my students. It is hard to lay down the law in the classroom when they have seen me tell my two-and-a-half-year-old, "We are absolutely not buying Taytos", and then see us leave with multiple packets of Taytos. 

If I can’t discipline my toddler effectively, the odds of me disciplining a teenager who is legally entitled to vote in local elections are slim to none.

Often, in shops, I overhear parents, who are surely better than me, telling children: "OK, it’s Friday, get your treat." 

I spend more time than I would like to admit considering whether these parents can be for real or whether these people are just trying to mess with my head. A treat once a week? In the name of all that is Deliveroo, surely this doesn’t actually happen in the real world.

I tried to fob off fruit as a treat for a while, by cultivating a ‘treat basket’ containing bananas, biscuits, and grapes, in the hope that I would remove the stigma of ‘bad foods’ and just have the children looking at food as just that: Food.

The grapes quickly gathered dust and the biscuits were polished off sooner than you can say, "Just lie back there and let’s see what’s happening with this root canal".

My own sugar intake

Notwithstanding my attempts at making our snack foods a level playing field, I’d be a hypocrite if I said I don’t reach for the biscuits myself after a long night of telling jokes to disgruntled audiences (my night job as a stand-up comedian) or a long day of telling jokes to disgruntled audiences (my day job as a secondary school teacher). 

Can we really judge children for reaching for the sweet treats first, when they have watched us throw out uneaten fruit but never uneaten chocolate?

What I’m saying is rather than fix my children’s relationship with the sweet stuff, I should probably be examining my own.

Having had gestational diabetes fairly badly during both pregnancies, it did cause me to think about how much I relied on high-sugar foods to get me through the day, but mostly it had me cursing the pregnancy gods for sending my blood sugars through the roof because I had committed the cardinal carbohydrate crime of consuming a slice of brown bread.

Once, I had some pineapple, and the next day at my hospital appointment the medical team were practically calling the police on me. 

Apparently, consuming pineapple is the equivalent of injecting Class A drugs during pregnancy. That is not recommended.

All of this treat talk is, of course, never more intensified than when we face into Easter and pretend that we haven’t secretly been consuming Easter eggs in our car since late February, when the children weren’t looking.

As we approach every bunny and basket weaver’s favourite holiday, it is impossible to escape the eternal question: How many eggs are too many eggs? 

How do I discourage family members from arriving with chocolate? How do I convey to my nearest and dearest that getting me any egg that isn’t milk chocolate is enough to cut you out of my life forever?

With Easter, as with any other time of year, we, as parents, are just out here doing our best, and if our intentions are good, then that, in and of itself, means we are being good parents, because intention is half the battle. 

If anything makes me feel better about the melted Twix bar in my jeans pocket, it is that.