How to Care For Your Child Around Halloween

Here are some teacher tested tips to help your child recover after the excitement of Halloween while creating a positive home environment at the same time!

Balance Your Child’s Diet

Your child’s diet will affect their energy level, performance at school, and ability to do their homework. Interestingly, research now shows that sugar in small quantities is not harmful for children. A piece of candy after a healthy meal will not harm your child. The problem? The candy comes in much bigger proportions around Halloween. Around the candy rush of Halloween, focus your main meals on salads, fruit, and healthier choices! Balance their diet to keep their bodies healthy and their minds sharp!

• Related Reading: One Magic Breakfast To Help Your Child Fight Colds

Be Creative About Reducing the Amount of Candy

• After Halloween and accumulating the candy set rules on how much candy they can have and what they need to do in order to get it! For example, they can have have a piece of candy on a weekend after lunch and if they have helped with the dishes. They can have a candy every time they have done 30min of instrument practice, math HW, etc.
• Another great use of leftover candy is doing after-Halloween educational games. Treasure Hunt Games are my favorite! They are always a great idea to instill long-lasting habits and help children feel motivated about different task expected of them. In my case, I have used those with reluctant violin practicers very effectively. At home you can chose to work on any activity your child is not so fond of, yet do it consistently in a positive and fun way.
• I play a Fall/Halloween game with my students every year that can also be a great one to use at home. I have a basket full of candy. Each candy is wrapped up with a piece of paper asking the students to perform a task-play a specific song, show a correct posture, etc. At home that may be doing a house chore, doing a couple of pages extra reading, etc. Once they complete the task, they are allowed to eat the candy.
• I love the comment one of our readers made about the “great pumpkin”. After Halloween, put a Halloween basket with the collected candy in front of the door. Explain to your child that ever night the great pumpkin would take one candy in order to feed another child elsewhere who is hungry.  A great way to develop character and to lessen the candy eaten after Halloween.

• Related Reading: How Games Can Teach Your Child to Help Around the House

If Your Child Starts Acting Out At School

You have a perfectly well behaved child. And suddenly…you hear about discipline problems at school. You may start noticing your child acting up at home as well.

As a teacher, I see the most discipline problems happen around this time of the school year. It is after one of this Halloween weeks I wrote a post about receiving Unexpected Phone Call Home from your teacher helping explain the teacher’s side and offering parents support. Funnily, this one posts gets the most Google searches around that time of year. Other teachers and parents must be experiencing the same thing!

Realize that everybody is tired. This is difficult time of the school year. At that time students start getting tired and the school work demands increase at the same time. Both teachers and students start feeling overwhelmed.

Simply realizing the dynamics around that time of year is very important.

Analyze the situation- is this something that needs to be addressed or was it a one time event? Don’t jump into quick conclusion both about your child or your child’s teacher. Instead, take a step back and carefully think about the situation. Keep in touch with the teacher and observe your child’s behavior for a longer period in order to get an objective answer about how your child is doing.