“How do I respond to my kids when they ask for more sweets without them feeling restricted from them?”

There are a lot of things we might say to our kids when it comes to food, especially desserts. But few things said will actually  help support your child in building a healthy relationship with food. 

Because when it’s witching hour and you’re scrambling to get dinner on the table, I’m betting you can only hear your child ask you for some kind of sweets or desserts before you start to lose your cool. 

We often say things to our kids out of habit, or because that’s the only way we learned how to communicate with them. Or we may be reacting to our children and protecting our own emotional discomforts. Or we simply may be recycling phrases to our kids that we heard growing up from our own parents and caregivers. 

Whatever the scenario may be, it’s important to understand how you talk with your children about food matters and impacts how your kids will feel about eating certain foods and in their bodies. 

Nowhere do I see this truer than when it comes to children and sweets.

Why is that? 

For many adults and kids alike, sugar (including a variety of sweets and desserts), can be an emotionally charged subject. There’s a lot of controversy and information overwhelm that makes these foods more complex than others. 

The good news is that you can be empowered as a parent to intentionally choose language and create conversations around food that helps support your child in building a positive relationship with food. And this includes sweets!

But first it’s important to be aware of how you may currently talk about food and the language you might use with your kids. 

If you think about, what are some of the phrases you’ve heard or said when it comes to your child asking for sweets? 

Here are some common ones: 

• “That has too much sugar in it.”

• “You’re going to be bouncing off the walls if you eat all of that.”

• “Too much candy is bad for you.”

• “It’s not healthy to eat too many sweets.”

• “You shouldn’t be eating that.”

• “No! You’ve had enough of that!”

Now, if you’ve ever said or used these phrases with your own child - that is okay. This is not meant to guilt you or making you feel bad for your current parenting approaches. Feeding kids is hard, and you’re doing the best you can with the information you have. 

Why We Might Say Certain Phrases Around Sweets

You may respond to your child with these phrases when those sugar requests come knocking because that’s how you were responded to as a child. Or you may have heard other parents responding similarly to their own children. 

These are also mainstream messages perpetuated by our culture that is saturated with fear of food and eating.

You might respond to your child in this manner because sugar may make you uncomfortable or you feel anxious seeing your child eating sweets. You may just be at your limit with repeated questions and requests from your kids, and certain statements or word choices may be said with the intention to get them to stop asking. 

While I can guarantee that your intent behind the choice of words and language you use to communicate with your child about sweets is well-intentioned, it’s helpful to step back and see the big picture of how your word choices may be interpreted. 

Certain statements around food, and sweets in particular, can plant seeds in your children’s brain, which will shape the way they view themselves and the food they eat, for years and years to come. 

So how can you determine if how you’re responding to them is effective or not? 

Examining if What We’re Saying is Helpful or Harmful

To answer this question, it’s important to take a step back and see the big picture. When it comes to feeding kids, you have to do so with the end goal in mind, otherwise, the journey will be a struggle. 

We spend a lot of time worrying about the details of what to feed kids and have an agenda about what they ‘should’ eat, that we sometimes lose sight of the bigger picture. Much of this is driven by the pressure in our society to raise the “perfect eater”, but this is an arbitrary standard that creates unrealistic expectations around how kids eat. 

It’s easy to see how language can be formed from these core beliefs around expectations for how we think kids should or shouldn’t eat. For example, you might think your child will want to stay away from eating sweets or will eat less of them if you’re able to label these foods as “unhealthy” or “bad”, but unfortunately, this is not the way kids interpret this type of language around food (more on this below). 

More importantly, it’s crucial to see what are the agendas you may have driving the way you approach food with your kiddos. 

Are you chasing an elusive goal when it comes to your child’s food and nutrition? 

Or are you focused on the bigger picture at hand: raising a child that has a healthy relationship with food and who is confident in their bodies. 

The first is focused on attempting to achieve short-term results. 

The second is looking at long-term goals. 

Your choice of language around food with your kiddos is constantly going to be serving one of these two scenarios. 

If your child is asking for sugar, a short-term goal may be to get him to stop asking or to divert his attention away from sugar temporarily. Other short term goals may involve wanting to persuade your child’s food preferences toward something that feels safer or more comfortable for you. 

On the other hand, responding to your child’s sugar requests with the long-term goal in mind may involve proactive language and action that helps your child explore food and her body through a neutral lens. 

So the question remains - how can you be intentional about choosing responses and language around food, especially sweets, that support the long-term feeding goals that support your child’s overall health and well being? 

Language: The Way We Talk to Kids About Food Matters

Why does the way you talk about food matter?

Think about your word choices around food as a gateway that may determine how your child feels about eating those foods. 

To understand this further, it may be helpful to take a closer look at how your children’s brains may be working and interpreting some of the words they’re hearing about food. 

First, it’s important to see how kids think in binary terms, which means they tend to interpret things in a black and white way of thinking. As adults, we have the capacity to understand the nuances of certain situations - to see the gray areas, but kids can’t quite grasp the different meanings of  certain expressions. 

So for example, if a child is told too much candy is bad for her, she may interpret this to mean she is bad for eating candy.

As the parent, what you might really be trying to communicate with your child is candy isn’t something she’ll be having with every meal, but because of the binary lens through which your child processes information, she won’t interpret your language as such. 

This is especially true with polarizing terms around food and sweets in particular. Kids lock on to dichotomy to process information: “good versus bad”, “healthy versus unhealthy”. While we may understand there is not a moral connection to food, kids can’t see the nuances. They begin to internalize language used to describe food as descriptors about themselves. 

Let’s take the candy example again. 

Let’s say a child is told that too much candy is bad for her. But then on Halloween, she’s allowed to have some candy from her hard earned trick-or-treat loot. She’s now receiving conflicting messages that will be difficult to rectify in her brain. This triggers the phenomena called “cognitive dissonance”, which is the experience of discomfort when two thoughts or beliefs are incompatible with one another. 

As adults, we experience this on the regular but have the capacity to work through and resolve conflicting information in our brain as we encounter it. 

However, children don’t yet have the ability to do this. In short, conflicting information around food can be troubling for your child to process. It can create unnecessary tension and confusion around how your child may feel about food and her body, and in this instance, sweets. 

You can see how this repeated pattern of conflicting messages with languages and actions can create a sense of chaos for a child around that food, triggering feelings and behaviors such as: 

• Hoarding or sneaking sweets

• Recurring patterns of overeating sweets, or having an inability to respond to satiety cues

• Guilt and shame around eating certain foods, like sweets or desserts

• Increasing risk of disordered eating

• Eating in the absence of hunger, recurring patterns of emotional eating

Indeed, I’ve worked with many mothers who still feel conflicted about sweets and can stem it back to misleading messages they heard about sugar as a child. 

When we take a step back to see how kids might interpret our choice of words and language around food, it’s easier to understand why the way we talk to kids about food, especially sweets, is of the utmost importance. 

So, for all practical purposes, what does this look like?

How can you be intentional around the words you’re using when talking about food and sweets with your kids? How can you respond to their repeated requests for sugar without giving them conflicted information about these foods? 

11 Phrases to Say to Your Child When They Ask For Sweets

The good news is that there are many ways to use language proactively around food to help support and nurture your child’s healthy relationship with food. It starts with awareness of what your current discussions might look like and intentionality with word choices that help build a trust between you and your child. 

Because at the end of the day, feeding your child is an extension of parenting, and working toward building a trusting feeding relationship with your child can help them trust themselves and their bodies with food. 

Avoiding conflicting messages in your language and discussions around food is one of the most important vehicles for facilitating and building this trust between you and your child. 

I know this can be new for a lot of parents, so I want to give you some practical tools you can use to communicate with your child, especially when you’re getting repeated requests for desserts and sugar and are unsure how to respond. 

I’ve divided these up into the different scenarios you might encounter this questions. Keep in mind these are just examples - you can absolutely adjust these phrases to meet your children where they’re at. 

Along with these phrases, be sure to check out some key ideas to keep in mind when approaching desserts with your child. Helping our children includes both language AND action.

Situation: Your child may be asking for more of dessert at mealtimes

Response Suggestions:

• “I know you loved eating those cookies, so we’re going to have more of those tomorrow. Right now, there’s other food on the table you can eat if you’re still hungry.”

• “We’ll have more gummy bears with your lunch tomorrow.”

• “That’s all the ice cream we’re having with this meal, but we’ll have some more for our snack tomorrow.”

• “We’re going to enjoy some other foods for dinner right now, but we’ll have more cake again with dinner tomorrow.”

Situation: Your child may be asking for sweets between structured meals and snacks.

Response Suggestions:

• “You can pick out some candy to eat with your dinner tonight.”

• “I hear you saying you’d really like some of those jelly beans. Let’s have some with our snack after we get back from the library.”

Situation: Your child may be asking for sweets you don’t have in your home.

Response Suggestions:

• “Those were all the cookies we had available, but you can pick some out the next time we go to the grocery store.”

• “We don’t have those right now, but it sounds like something you’re interested in trying. Let’s look for them next time we’re at the store.”

Situation: When your child has more access to sweets or desserts (these may be special occasions, parties, etc or simply times where you strategically allow your child more exposure to desserts).

Response Suggestions:

• “You can trust your body to tell you how much you need to eat.”

• “Yes, you can have another cookie. Listen to what your tummy wants.”

• “All foods give our bodies the energy we need to play. What does your tummy feel like eating?”

Here are some other points to keep in mind along with these phrases: 

1. Lead with a yes:

You want your children to be reassured that sweets and sugar are always part of their future.

Constantly hearing, “No”, can create a sense of deprivation, which can trigger urges to overeat those foods down the road.

Leading with a yes doesn’t mean giving into what your child wants in that particular moment. It’s strategically using language to help your child understand more is coming in the future.

Example: “Yes, we can have more of those cookies with our lunch tomorrow. Right now, here’s what we’re having for dinner.” - This is effectively telling your child, “No, we’re not having more cookies right now”, without saying, “No!”.

2. Structure around food still matters:

Changing your language doesn’t mean giving in to your child’s every demand.

That is not supportive for your child either.

Continue to offer sweets within the context of your child’s regularly structured meals and snacks. Letting your children have free-range to the fridge and pantry and eating anything whenever they want won’t be helpful for you or your child. 

For more help on this topic, be sure to check out this post, “Kids Candy: Growing Healthy Children Need to Eat Candy, Too.”

3. Talking to kids in terms of events versus time:

Kids don’t view time in the same way we do, especially younger kids.

So if you tell your child, “We’re going to have more candy later”, this can feel arbitrary and difficult for your child to grasp.

Instead, try using functions or events in your child’s day to help them better understand when certain foods are coming.

This is especially important if you’re getting frequent requests or nagging around sweets.

For example, you might say, “After nap time today, we’re going to have cookies and milk for snack.”, or “After we go to the library, we can pick out a candy to eat with lunch.”

When your child can understand sweets are part of her future, it can help quell any anxiety she might feel around the food itself. 

4. Call desserts by their actual names:

We’re used to lumping in all types of sugar-based foods into categories like “sweets” or “desserts”, but categorizing food can make it more emotionally charged for your child.

Instead, when talking with your child, call desserts by their actual names, like, “Lollipops, gummy bears, jelly beans, ice cream, etc.”

5. Serve desserts with dinner to establish an equal playing field:

Saving desserts for special occasions or only using sweets as a reward for kids can backfire and essentially put these foods up on a pedestal.

By offering dessert with your child’s structured meals and snacks, you’re putting all foods on an equal playing field, which gives your child an opportunity to self-regulate the amount of food that feels best in her body.

This is an important step for helping your child build a positive relationship with food and her body and to not feel obsessive about any particular food, like desserts. 

Why Your Child May Be Asking Frequently For Sweets

If you’re getting frequent requests for sweets from your kiddos, it’s important to address any underlying issues related to this. 

In some circumstances, kids may be preoccupied with eating sweets because they aren’t getting enough exposure to them. 

A child who isn’t having regular exposures to desserts and sweets may actually become more obsessive about eating them. 

This can look like frequent requests for sweets, nagging/whining over desserts, or meltdowns when sweets are available. 

In this case, it’s important to not only address language around your child with sweets, but also to look at any underlying causes triggering frequent requests for sweets. 

One of the best ways to continue supporting your child in building a positive relationship with food is a combination of our language (how we’re communicating to our children about food) PLUS follow through action (how you’re engaging with your child around and with food). 

The combination of these things is important for building a trusting feeding relationship. 

So if you’re telling your child more cookies will be available with lunch or you tell your kids they can pick out a couple pieces of candy to have with dinner, it’s crucial to follow through with this. In other words, changing your language alone is pointless unless you have follow-through action to reinforce your words.

Withholding sweets from your child or restrictive feeding practices can lead to eating in the absence of hunger. Meaning, your child will be more likely to overeat the very foods you may be trying to limit, when given the opportunity.

The follow through action is key to reinforcing your language around food AND to helping your child build trust with you and food. Trust is the most crucial element to your child feeling safe with food and her body, and she learns trust by how she engages with you and her primary caregivers. 

If you suspect that your child may need more exposure to sugar but are unsure how to implement this in your home, be sure to check out this blog here: “How Much Sugar is Okay For My Child to Eat?”

Reacting Versus Responding To Your Child

Remember: feeding your children is an extension of parenting.

When it comes to parenting and feeding your kids, your role is to be a thermostat for your children, not a thermometer. 

What does this mean?

If you think about it, thermometers reflect and react to their environment - which means, they’re constantly changing as the weather changes. 

Thermostats on the other hand, are proactive in their environment. It’s function is to respond to AND regulate the temperature of the environment it’s in. 

For example, you might have a thermostat in your home for a set temperature. If the temperature of the home rises above the desired temperature, the thermostat would turn on the air conditioner to “course correct” the temperature. Similarly, if the temperature dropped below the desired temperature, the thermostat might kick on the heater to remedy this. Thermostats are functioning proactively to correct change to achieve a desired outcome. 

So what does this have to do with parenting and feeding your kids? 

EVERYTHING. 

Think of your kids as a thermometer. Their attitudes, behaviors, moods, etc. may be constantly changing - sometimes multiple times in the course of one single day! This is undoubtedly exhausting for parents. 

Sometimes, it’s easier to react to your children (like a thermometer) rather than respond (like a thermostat), particularly with repeated requests for sweets.

Especially when you’re feeling tired, stressed and overwhelmed, it’s going to be harder to respond to what your child might be needing in a moment where emotions are running high. But here’s the thing: you want your children to feel safe to express their thoughts and feelings, especially around food. 

So often when kids are making food requests and demands (especially with sweets), it’s easier to react to them, to be a thermometer. When really, what your children need is for you to respond in a manner that doesn’t create further emotional charge around food. 

As an example, let’s say your child is throwing a tantrum and is upset that you won’t let him have candy or another dessert. 

Reacting to your child might involve trying to quiet him down and get over the food fussing. Reacting often involves saying phrases in an attempt to “put out the fire”, like, “You already ate enough sugar today!”, or “No more, this is so bad for you!”. 

But as we’ve discussed earlier, your language around food matters.

Reacting to your child in this manner can not only create negative energy around the food itself, but it’s also communicating to your child that he doesn’t have permission to express his emotions without feelings of shame or criticism. This is especially dangerous around food related topics with kids, because they’re associating feelings of guilt with food AND with themselves.  

So how can you transition to becoming the thermostat instead of the thermometer? To RESPOND to your child rather than react, especially around conversations related to food and sugar? 

This can be a tricky concept, but with intentionality, you can make a transition to helping your children learn that they’re safe to express themselves and to trust that food is safe as well. 

You can see how the phrases above are all ways in which you can be intentional about responding to your child with sugar-related (or any food) requests.

Here are some common examples when it comes to how you can RESPOND to your children rather than react, specifically for dessert related requests: 

Instead of (Reacting):

• “Sugar is so bad for you!”

• “You already ate too many sweets today!”

• “You need to eat your veggies before you get dessert.”

Try this (Responding):

• “We’re going to enjoy some other foods today.”

• “I can see you’d really like to eat that. Let’s have some with our lunch.”

• “We’re having cookies with our dinner tonight.”

The goal is to give your child a safe space to express what he might be feeling and to approach sweets in a way that doesn’t create shame or guilt. 

Examining Your Own Relationship With Food and Feelings About Desserts

On one final note, helping your child around food can also be an opportunity to examine your own relationship with food. 

For many parents, feeding kids can bring a lot of unresolved matters to the surface. If you’ve had a rocky relationship with food in your past or have a hard time trusting yourself with certain foods, this may inevitably project in the way you feed your child or speak to them about food. 

If you’ve struggled with making peace with food or your body, you may find certain aspects of feeding your own children to be triggering or upsetting in some way. This is OKAY. Awareness of where you’re currently at is necessary for knowing how to move forward. 

You can still help support your child in building a positive relationship with food, even if you’re learning how to make peace with food yourself. 

One of the most powerful ways you can help your child with this is continuing to do your own healing work with food and your body. It may not be easy or uncomfortable, but doing this work can help you take an overall approach to feeding that's different from your default and that redirects the next generation to a new normal.

If you need help healing your own relationship with food or support with how you’re feeding your own child, please connect with me today.

Be encouraged in knowing that wherever you may be on your journey, you have the opportunity to support your children in building a positive relationship with food and their bodies. 

This begins with examining your own attitudes and beliefs toward desserts and with intentionality around your language, especially in response to requests for sweets.

You’ve got this, mama!