I took my kids trick-or-treating on a few occasions, but the more I thought about the messages we were communicating to our kids, the more I began to think trick-or-treating might not be such a great idea.
Ironically, while growing up, Halloween was one of my favorite holidays. What kid doesn't like candy? Having a free-for-all candy night with no adult supervision was the equivalent of kid Heaven.
But now, I stand on the side of those who think we should ban trick-or-treating.
#1 Reason to Ban Trick-or-Treating
Letting our children trick-or-treat contradicts our position that sugar is bad for their teeth and bad for them. We limit the sugar our children eat all year, but one day a year we give them a free rein to eat as much sugar as they want.
Do you have any idea how much sugar they consume? The average kid consumes three cups of sugar on Halloween!
Eating Halloween candy is not limited to one night, either. For however long it takes them to get through their bag of candy, that's how many days they are filling their bodies with harmful amounts of sugar.
The gross amount of sugar consumption creates severe sugar spikes in our children's blood levels, leaving them feeling not so well.
Overeating candy comes with the underconsumption of wholesome foods, which only exacerbates the problem.
Allowing our children to trick or treat on Halloween and eat so much candy is not practicing what we preach, nor is it responsible parenting. I'm guilty too, but when the facts are on the table—wow.
I read that one dentist pays children $2.00 for every pound of Halloween candy they give him. While I can appreciate the intention behind this gesture, is it sending our kids the right message?
We buy the candy, the kids knock on our doors, we give them the candy, and then the kids sell it to the dentist.
How can turning our kids into greedy candy peddlers be a solution? Greed is the #1 problem in the world today, and we are all suffering because of it. We don't want to encourage greediness in our children, do we?
#2 Reason to Ban Trick-or-Treating
We teach our kids not to talk to strangers, and we teach them that it isn't polite to ask people for things, yet, one night a year, we let our kids knock on the doors of strangers and ask them for candy.
One shameful moment for me as a kid happened one day on my way home from school. I had just turned twelve, and my best friend Bridget and I were famished after a long day sitting in classrooms.
At about 3:20 in the afternoon, as we were walking home with grumbling stomachs, we had this bright idea.
We could trick-or-treat!
We knocked on the door of an apartment near our school, and an elderly woman opened the door. Very surprised to see us, she asked, "Isn't it a little early, girls?" She gave us some candy anyway.
As an adult looking back, not just on that isolated incident but on the idea of knocking on a stranger's door and asking for candy, isn't this a contradiction?
We teach our kids not to speak to strangers and NEVER to take candy from a stranger, yet once a year, it is permissible. We teach them that it's not polite to ask for things, yet once a year, it is permitted.
#3 Reason to Ban Trick-or-Treating
But here's the crux of the matter: Halloween is a creepy holiday; it has gotten even creepier since the corporate world has taken it more seriously.
In my old neighborhood, a neighbor had gravestones on his front lawn and skeletons that moved and looked like they were coming out of graves. When we drove up the hill at night, my kids used to get scared because the scene looked so real.
So did I!
And that was a mild scene. My friend's neighbor in the town next to us would spend a fortune decorating his lawn until it looked like the scene out of a horror movie. I used to wonder what on earth that man was thinking.
Halloween is supposed to be for kids, not psychopaths.
I like the idea of carving pumpkins, but should we be wasting food like that? With so much starvation and deprivation in the world, it seems insensitive to waste pumpkins for a night of amusement.
For Halloween, about 22.2 million pumpkins go to waste! At your average price of $5.00 per pumpkin, that's 111,000,000 dollars of food that we waste. The average cost to feed one person per day in the US is supposed to be about $11.00 (seems very low); divided by 111, 000,000, we could feed 10 million people, roughly.
My god, that's shameful.
On second thought, we should ban Halloween.
☞ Disclaimer: This is not a politically-correct blog.
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