Chris and I are pretty strict with junk food/candy consumption with Kaia. Sure, we let her have bites (and sometimes even half or more) of treats we get on the weekends, like croissants or ice cream/gelato. But she never gets her own ice cream or croissant. She rarely has “ultra processed” packaged food. She might have a pouch maybe once every four to six months because we want her to focus on eating real whole foods. But it’s frustrating for us when she see her classmates get packaged junk food almost regularly. Her (natural) thought is: why do all my friends get the “good stuff,” and my parents don’t let me have it? It’s clear that some of her little classmates even get candy every single day. So when I picked her up today and she immediately demanded “Bluey cookies,” I said no, I didn’t have any. And she erupted into a tantrum and almost refused to walk down the stairs from her school with me. When we got down to the building lobby, Ah Gong, the “doorman” of the school building, immediately wanted to go into “solutioning,” and the way adults of his generation do this is by offering candy. He pulled out his metal candy tin (of course, he has one of those at his desk!), and he let Kaia pick out 2-3 pieces to take home. “It’s okay, let her be happy! She is usually so guai guai!” he insisted to me in Chinese as she stopped crying, smiled, said “xie xie” to him, and happily skipped away.

We got on the train, and Kaia asked if she could open the candies (she doesn’t quite have the dexterity yet to open these on her own, thankfully). I said no, and then inevitably, she fought me. “But Ah Gong gave it to me!” she cried.

Yes, he may have given them to you, I said to her, but that doesn’t mean you can open or eat them. The other issue with these candies is that they are hard candies, so they are, by definition, a choking hazard for someone of her size and age, especially while in a moving vehicle.

So, these candies inevitably get hidden somewhere out of her reach… and then I will eventually throw them out. Neither Chris nor I eat almost any of them, and we don’t let Kaia eat them. It kind of feels like a waste, I guess it does serve as a temporary appeasement for a toddler having a tantrum in the moment.