The Halloween Bucket Comes Home Full. Decide Now, Not at Half Past Eight.

The bucket comes home full. That is when the actual argument starts.

Not on the street, where everybody is having a nice time, but at about half past eight in a hallway, when a child who has already eaten four things wants a fifth and you have to decide, on the spot and with no plan, what the rule is. Whatever you say next will be the rule for the next three weeks, because you will not have the energy to renegotiate it.

So it is worth deciding earlier than that.

First, the thing you are probably worried about is not the thing

Most of us go into Halloween braced for the sugar to turn our child into somebody else for the evening. We looked at that properly in the piece on Halloween sweets and behaviour, and the short version is that the research has been trying and failing to find that effect since the 1990s. What is actually happening on Halloween night is a child who is out after dark, in a costume, in a group, in the cold, being handed things. Any one of those would do it.

That matters here because it changes what the rules are for. They are not damage control against a substance. They are there so that a pile of sweets the size of a cushion does not become the only thing anyone talks about for a fortnight.

Sort it before anyone eats anything

Tip the whole lot onto the floor and sort it. Into favourites and the rest, or into chocolate and chewy and the strange ones, or by colour if they are four. It takes ten minutes, it is the part of the night children like best after the doorbells, and it does three quiet jobs at once.

• They see how much there is, which is the moment they stop treating each individual sweet as scarce.
• You get to spot anything with a warning on it before it is opened, which matters if there are allergies in the house.
• Roughly a third of it gets voluntarily thrown into the reject pile, because no child actually wants all of it.

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Once it is sorted, get it out of the bucket. A bucket is a permanent visual reminder sitting on the counter. Small containers, one per pile, into a cupboard, and the whole thing stops being a monument.

Then pick one of these three

None of them is better than the others. They suit different children, and the one that suits yours is usually obvious once you read them.

The daily allowance. Two things after dinner, every day, until it runs out. Best for the child who copes well with a rule that never changes and badly with one that gets revisited. The cost is that it keeps Halloween alive in the house for about a month.

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The three good days. They eat what they like on Halloween, the day after, and the weekend, and then the rest goes. Best for the child who finds daily rationing unbearable and would rather have a proper go and be done. It ends the whole business inside a week.

The swap. They choose ten to keep and the rest is traded for one thing they actually want. A book, a trip, whatever the equivalent is in your house. Best for children over about seven, who can do that arithmetic and often find it a good deal.

If the daily version is the one you pick, a visual countdown on the kitchen wall does more work than you would think, for the same reason a visual timer beats saying five more minutes.

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What to do with what is left

The reject pile has somewhere to go. A lot of dental practices in the United States run a buy-back in the first week of November, and food banks will usually take sealed, in-date sweets, though it is worth ringing first because some will not. Bakes and traybakes eat through a surprising amount of it. Whatever is left after all of that can simply go in the bin, and it is worth saying plainly that throwing away sweets is not wasteful. It was free and most of it was never going to be eaten.

Do the disposal with them rather than while they are at school, though. The thing children mind is not losing the sweets. It is finding out afterwards that a decision about their things was made without them, which is the same mechanism behind what happens when the toys get quietly thinned out.

One more thing about the fight itself

If the sweets have become the main argument in your house, it is worth checking whether they are really the subject.

Food is one of the very few areas where a young child has genuine leverage, and a household with a lot of other rules in it will sometimes find that all of the pushing back arrives here. Ellyn Satter’s division of responsibility, which we go into in the piece on the dinner table, is the same idea from the other direction. You decide what and when. They decide whether and how much. Halloween is easier to run when the rest of the year already works like that.