You’ve all witnessed it. You are hosting your 5 year-old child’s birthday party and you had a pinata filled with candy. Once broken into, all the kids go mad collecting arm loads of candy. They pop a couple pieces in their mouths before cake time. Then you let them have a big chunk of cake and scoop of ice cream because it’s a special occasion.
After all the cake and ice cream is eaten it becomes a madhouse. Hyperactive kids running rampant, the noise level is through the roof and all the parents are looking to see if there are any adult beverages available. 🍷
All the moms say “They are on a sugar-high, look at them, they are crazy!”
BUT IT IS NOT TRUE!
I’m guilty. I thought it was a real thing too!
I recently read an excellent book by Nir Eyal called Indistractable. He wrote a section towards the end on creating “Indistractable Children” and wrote about the myth of the sugar-high. This captured my attention. How can this be true?
So I did what any sugar-conscious mom would do and I researched this so-called myth.
I will spare you all the scientific details but will link to the studies at the end if you want to do your own research.
The evidence, thus far, doesn’t show any significant difference in the behavior of children after consuming sugar.
What does all this mean?
It means we as parents have expectations of our children and also don’t want to take responsibility for the wild behavior our children are displaying. It’s easier to point to sugar as the reason. That was a gut shot when I first heard it put that way.
This led me to wonder more about parent responsibility in other areas of our kids’ lives.
How much responsibility are we pushing off onto objects that might elicit negative behavior from our kids?
Gulp.
Yeah….I’m guilty. I have definitely blamed certain things like technology, sugar, tv, friends for my kids’ poor behavior.
But here is the thing, we are the ones in charge of our children so we need to have a conversation about all of these behaviors with our kids.
Nir Eyal discusses in Indistractable ways to have conversations with our kids about these things without it becoming a demand or coercion to change from parents.
Our children need to have input, they need to have a sense of responsibility just as we do.
“Empowering children with the autonomy to control their own time is a tremendous gift. Even if they fail from time to time, failure is part of the learning process. -Nir Eyal
The conversations need to be held in order to create change in our kids’ behavior, BUT it starts with us as parents taking responsibility for our childrens’ behavior.
Time to point the fingers back on our parental responsibility instead of sugar! I’m just as guilty so I’m pointing all the fingers at myself!
A note on health: Since we started this newsletter talking about sugar let's end with talking about sugar too! Because sick season is upon us with head colds, flu and all other illnesses we need to build up the strongest immune systems we can.
Did you know 25 teaspoons of sugar will drop your immune response by 40%!
40%!!!!!!
25 teaspoons = 100grams
You may not be even eating dessert-like-food but I challenge you to look at every nutrition label on all the foods you eat. Sugar is in a surprising amount of foods we eat everyday.
So other than avoiding large amounts of sugar here are a few other tips for keeping a strong immune system:
10 minutes in the sun everyday or a Vitamin D3 supplement
Prebiotic, probiotic and postbiotics. I take a 3-1 supplement that has all 3 of these in 1 supplement. You can grab it here, and save $10 on your first order. *Full disclosure: I earn commission on the sale of this.
Drink a lot of water
Exercise
Get enough sleep. Rest when your body is telling you too!
That’s all for now!
Have a blessed week!
Links to research:
Original article I read with research linked:
Effects of Sugar ingestion expectancies on mother-child interactions:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/7963081/
Effects of Diets High in Sucrose and Aspartame:
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJM199402033300501#t=article
Effect of sugar on behavior and cognition in children:
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/article-abstract/391812