Lessons from a chocolate advent calendar

I love the build up to Christmas; it’s such an exciting time. And a hectic time too – let’s be honest. Amid this year’s pre-Christmas chaos, I learned something about myself that both surprised me and gave me pause for thought.

Let’s skip back 25 (okay, 35) years to when I was a child. All my friends had chocolate advent calendars but my brother and I did not. (Mum – I know you read my blog posts – at least you gave me something to tell my therapist). This was a source of major contention. My brother and I felt really left out… We’d go to other people’s houses and see their Cadbury’s calendars and just long for that daily piece of chocolate to eat after breakfast for the whole of December.

Back to the beginning of December, and what kind of advent calendar do my three kids have this year? No chocolate. Just pictures. “Didn’t do me any harm”. And then one week into December, I get a note. Well, more a petition really. It reads: “Dear Mummy, please, please, please can we have a chocolate advent calendar. All our friends have one. Why can’t we? Please!” It had several signatories, including the cat.

My first reaction was “No!’  – we don’t do chocolate advent calendars. No way.” Then I stopped and thought for a moment. What was behind this knee-jerk reaction; the same knee-jerk reaction I have every year?  Actually, if I step back and get theoretical, I teach parents that it is better that children join in social occasions, eating the sweets (candy) their friends bring into school on birthdays or having whatever they feel like from the buffet at a child’s party. I teach that it is better for a child to eat something sugary or not especially nutritionally dense, than for them to feel restricted and different from their peers.

I have read a ton of academic papers explaining why restriction in the name of health can really backfire and why we need to be laid back and not demonise entire food groups, prioritising children’s long term relationship with food above short term nutrition. And yet even though I know all this stuff, in this case, I was not practising what I preach!

When I interrogated my reaction, I realised that it was as simple as this: I was mindlessly replicating something from my childhood because it felt right. And it felt right, because it was my normal. We tend to go one of two ways as parents – to either do exactly what we experienced when we were young, or to reject it wholesale and go the other way entirely. Both of these courses of action can be problematic depending on the context, and both can be unconscious.

I needed to really process my feelings about not having anywhere near as many sweets or chocolate as other kids when I was small (on the plus side: no fillings until I was in my late twenties, on the down side: I felt so left out when I opened my tin of nuts and apricots at the school residential and all the other children had piles of sweets!).

I did for a moment go down the ‘Well I turned out fine’ route, but a) I know that is ridiculous – how do we define ‘fine’ anyway? And is this a sound basis for making informed parenting decisions? Truthfully, I think it’s kind of a mindless argument made by people who don’t want to take a frank look at some potentially difficult stuff. And did I turn out alright? Sure, basically I did, but I have a very addictive personality –  I had to fight super hard to give up smoking when I was planning a family, for example, and if I eat chocolate of an evening, I don’t just have one piece, I’ll have a whole bar.

So – I concluded that my chocolate advent calendar policy was irrational and automatic rather than conscious and carefully thought out. I went to the shops and I bought… a chocolate advent calendar for the girls. Admittedly, I could only cope with one between three and it’s nice Swiss chocolate – I’m still a total chocolate snob and I want to know they are eating something that is good quality. It may sound like a small thing, but it took a lot for me to change my policy of 13 years and what I was used to growing up.

My lesson: if you are making a parenting decision and your only justification is “didn’t do me any harm” take a step back, think it through rationally and don’t be afraid to say that you may, perhaps, possibly… have got it wrong.