Too Much Junk Food!

Have you ever read the Berenstain Bear's book, Too Much Junk Food?  Well, last week I had my mama bear "Too Much Junk Food" moment.  I actually witnessed my husband bribing our daughter with a cupcake to eat a cookie.  I knew we had gone off the deep end.

A quick bit of background - The past 5 months have been a little rocky with our 4 year old daughter and in an effort to get the simplest tasks accomplished, we began using sugar as a bribe.  I knew it wasn't good, but it was necessary for survival.  But now things are better and clearly our daughter has learned how to maximize the sugar consumption, and I'm just so tired of saying, "No" all of the time.

So I pondered.  How do we solve this dilemma without creating total family meltdown?  Okay, that's a bit of an exaggeration but it's always the fear when you take away your easy parenting tool, right?

Here's my solution - I decided to implement a sugar chart.  It's pretty easy.  Each of the normally consumed sugar items (sugar cereal, cookies, ice cream, etc) has a point total.  For example, pancakes are 3 points.  Yogurt is 1 point. Each child gets 4 points a day of sugar during the week and 6 points a day on Saturday and Sunday.  Oh, and you can earn 1 point if you eat a serving of veggies!

So how's it going?  So far so good.  This morning she asked for goldfish (which is 1 point) but then also wanted a piece of the Juicy Fruit gum (she earned a piece of gum for something else) her grandmother gave her (also 1 point).  I explained that if she chose the Juicy Fruit instead of the sugar-free gum, she wouldn't have 3 points left to get frozen yogurt after dinner tonight (this is also a good math tool).  Amazingly, she peacefully chose the sugar-free gum and all was well.  I didn't have to say no.  She made the choice.  And far less sugar is being consumed!  Granted, our daughter usually responds well to new things like this, because it seems kind of fun.  So the real test is how is it going in two weeks.  I'll report back!