As the price of everything around us is seemingly sky rocketing so is the price of sweets and in turn the amount we as parents have to fork out on them!
It’s reported that per year, British children spend £413 MILLION on sweets, just on their journey to school alone. Curbing your child's sweetie spend has more than just financial benefits, it also is good for their oral and overall health.
Check out our top 8 tips for reducing the hole that sweets are burning in your pocket.
1) Educate Them on their Sugar Intake
Children aren’t aware of the bad in the world until they’re educated about it. Most children have a sweet tooth, and can only see the positives of sweetie consumption!
So, it is our job to let them know of the downsides that sweets carry. Sugar-filled sweets can cause early decay in teeth, which can result in pain and a trip to the dentist, which let's be honest, not many of us look forward to!
It can also impact our health and weight, leading to childhood obesity. This can lead to serious health problems such as diabetes, high blood pressure and high cholesterol. Check out stores like Edible Blooms which don’t just sell sweets and chocolates but fruit baskets – so your kids are at least getting a small portion of their 5 a day!
2) Make Your Own Pick ‘n’ Mix
Cinemas are known for their extortionate prices when it comes to refreshments. To try and limit your spending if you’re planning a family trip to see a film, you could try and make your own pick ‘n’ mix! You could pick up some real bargains at One Pound Sweets to fill up your pick n mix bags!
The price of these types of sweets at the cinema can soon rack up, so by creating your own at home you can save some money. Get the kids involved too, to build some excitement and allows them to pick all their favourite sweets! This also allows you to control their intake, instead of letting them loose at the tills.
You could also check out another great online store like ‘A Quarter Of’ who stock all your favourite boiled sweets, chewy sweets and pre-made pick n mix! The stuff dreams are made of at bargain prices!
3) Try Supermarket Own Brands
There is very little difference between the big name brands and supermarkets' own brands when it comes to sweets. Many of them are even made in the same factory!
If you know your kids can be fussy around brands, we’d advise buying them when the little ones aren’t around, and popping them in some nice glass jars in the kitchen. Not only does this add a lovely aesthetic to your kitchen, but the children will be none the wiser about what they were packaged in!
4) Bulk Buy Sweets
Some kids love taking a trip to the shops almost every day to buy sweets. Getting your fill this way is the most expensive way to buy treats. Even just the simple swap to multipacks available in supermarkets can save you some money.
If you’re really looking to stock up, there are wholesale shops and even online stores like Goddiva where you can buy in bulk. It’s a tip to make sure you know the use-by dates before buying too much, as this wouldn’t be cost-effective.
If Christmas or the summer holidays are coming up, and you know your kids are going to be asking for sweets more than usual, stocking up is sensible to save you from having to do any last-minute trips to the corner shop! Check out Swizzels where you can pick up some extra special refreshing summer treats.
5) Find Cheaper & Healthier Sweet Alternatives
If the kids in your life are after a sweet tooth kick, they don’t always have to have a sweetie. There are so many healthier alternatives to sugar-filled sweets, that also fill our body with goodness.
Making a big fruit salad for the children to snack on throughout the day is a great alternative to packets of sweets. If you think fresh fruit is a little on the pricey side, which it can be, you can even opt for tinned fruit. This is still much healthier than sweets, and more affordable.
6) Give Them a Packed Lunch for School Rather Than £
If you send your children to school with dinner money, you may be running the risk of them splurging it all on sweets in the shop on the way to school! This isn’t a nutritious way for them to spend their lunch break, and is also a waste of your money!
To prevent this, you can pack them a lunch box. You can still pop some of the treats in that they love like a small treat chocolate bar from Cadburys, but it means you know that they have a wholesome lunch in the middle of their day, giving them the energy and brain food to get through the afternoon. Not only will they not be wasting your money on sweets and crisps, but it will be cheaper overall to feed them yourself!
7) Set Weekly Sweet Guidelines
If your kid's sweet habit is getting a little out of hand, it may be worth introducing some household rules around sweets. You could make your kids personalised boxes with chocolate treats from Thorntons that you stock up at the start of the week, full of their weekly allowance of sweets.
They might eat it all in one day on the first week, but they will soon as the weeks go on how to pace themselves. This is also a great way to teach self-discipline! You could also swap out desserts after dinner for fruit, and save the extra special sweet treats from Hotel Chocolat for the weekend.
8) Don’t Use Sweets As a Reward
A really important tip to help control sweet consumption is to remove any association between good behaviour and sweets. By rewarding with sweets, your children will expect a sweet after every good thing that they do, and it can become an endless spiral.
There are other things you can reward your children with for good behaviour that don’t contribute to unhealthy sugar consumption. Everything is good in moderation, and that goes for sweets and chocolate too! Just remember to bring them out in a neutral way, not relating them at all to your children’s behaviour.
