Can you think of an alternative to the basket of enamel attackers?

Tooth Decay: The Real Monster of Halloween Nights!

It’s Halloween on Monday and the clocks change tonight. The seasons are changing and autumn is doing its glorious thing. Newly dark, longer nights and children dressed as ghouls knocking on doors: it paints a pleasant picture, raising thoughts of happy family times.

Tonight there will be containers full of sugary sweets ready and waiting at front doors everywhere by way of a reward for making the effort to dress up and go out Trick or Treating. In the past we’ve done this too at home – but this year we are thinking again, and I’d ask you to think again as well.

An Epidemic of Decayed Teeth

The UK is suffering an epidemic of tooth decay (there’s a good Halloween piece about this here by the British Dental Association). I’m sorry if you think that I’m being a killjoy, but the single biggest reason for child hospital admission in the UK right now is for a general anaesthetic for tooth extraction. A quarter of children in the UK have rotten teeth because of what they eat, and as parents we are the people who can do something about it.

This is the 21^st century and we are supposed to be an advanced nation with the health that goes with it.

The truth is that it is all too easy to reward children with relatively cheap sweets and to forget the consequences. There are however other ways of rewarding kids, and I wonder whether it would be unreasonable to ask parents out there to consider two things, not just at Halloween but always? OK, its just one night out of 365, but change is needed and we have to start somewhere.

Firstly, if a treat is meant to be something good, does it need to be in the (let’s face it, harmful) form of a sugary sweet? Is there something else you could give your child, or other children, to reward them for good behaviour or on special occasions?

Secondly, shouldn’t a treat be what it is, something that is infrequent and all the better for it?

Richard