innej54's Profile

BitterGrad: I loved my paper calendar, but it got too difficult for my husband and I to stay on the same page when sharing parenting duities, e.g., he'd be setting up a follow-up doctor's appointment at the same time I'd be setting up a meeting, but we wouldn't see the conflict until we got home and put it on paper. We now use google calendar on our iphones, and it has saved a world of headache. We have five kids and the two of us are both employed and do freelance work, so having a single set of color-coded calendars that can be updated and synced in real time has been awesome. You couldn't pay me enough to go back to paper!

@annieglan: A whole year later! Clearly I lost the thread shortly after posting. I do have a blog, but its focus is me-the-writer more than me-the-parent. You're welcome to visit it , though! It's jennieaton.com. I'd love to talk foster parent shop!

I disagree that "kids aren't gluttonous, candy-crazed maddies." Some kids are. I have six kids. They learn at different paces and in different contexts. There's a lag between "I, parent, have taught" and "I, child, have learned" and the length of that lag often has as much to do with personality as with age. And developmentally, no child can wrap their brain around the long-term consequences of frequent sugar binges.

Three of my kids have learned self control (ages 14, 7, and 5) and could make their candy stash last for a year. The other three (ages 10, 5, and 3) have no self control, and if given unlimited access to their candy, would binge until they threw up. "Live and learn" doesn't always work for them (and I'm not terribly interested in cleaning up puddles of regurgitated candy). One of my kids came to me via foster care, and she has dangerous insulin levels, i.e., she's pre-diabetic because she's been allowed to eat whatever she wants for the past ten years. Some of those "negative" messages are messages she actually needs not only to hear, but to internalize because her life has been endangered by her diet. She SHOULD feel guilty for binging on candy because it could kill her, and it IS best for her to eat candy when she's full so she doesn't binge on it.

Until self control is clearly exhibited by kids, I get to maintain ultimate control over when and how much candy the kids get. E.g., the two kids I found in their closet at 5:30am with their Halloween pillowcases and a giant pile of wrappers have lost the rest of their stash because they were unable to demonstrate self control. We don't forbid treats, but they are restricted and we are very open about why.