Parents get shamed for their Halloween candy policy

Halloween only comes once a year, which is part of why it’s completely OK for kids to indulge in all that candy they get from trick-or-treating. After all, while candy isn’t the most nutritious food, depriving kids of treats or teaching them that certain foods are “bad” isn’t the way to go, either—even nutritionists agree. And that’s why these parents are facing backlash because of their Halloween tradition, which involves taking almost all of their kid’s Halloween candy away and replacing it with a toy.

Utah health coach Levi Jensen and his wife shared their “switch witch” idea online, not realizing it would spark an intense debate.

“Trick-or-treating is fun, but kids don’t really need all that candy, so here’s what we do instead,” Jensen said in the video, which has now racked up tens of millions of views. 

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According to the video, at the end of Halloween night, Jensen and his wife allow their two-year-old daughter, Aria, to choose five pieces of candy to keep. The rest, she places on the porch for the “switch witch.” Overnight, the witch takes her candy away and replaces it with a toy.

The comments pretty much immediately turned into a dumpster fire, because, well, this is a ridiculous thing to do when you have a healthy child who can enjoy candy on a special occasion like Halloween (if your child has diabetes, food allergies, or another medical condition that makes eating candy difficult or impossible, however, this is a great idea).

“Dude it’s once a year….” wrote one commenter, who got nearly 30,000 likes. Another weighed in, “What happened to parents just letting kids be kids and enjoy halloween?”

One commenter shared their own experience with this kind of restriction.

“My parents did this and it was so detrimental to my relationship with food,” they wrote. “Everything was monitored and restricted so when I had a chance to have some ‘unhealthy’ food when they weren’t around, I went wild with it. Don’t do this to your kids. Teach them that the candy will always be there so they don’t have to eat it all at once. Build a good relationship with food rather then restricting the ‘bad’ food.”

Teaching kids that they can only have certain foods in limited amounts is virtually guaranteed to affect their relationship to it. Halloween is only once a year.