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Food

03rd Apr 2018

Kids under four should be banned from having Easter eggs, claims psychologist

Would you agree?

Anna O'Rourke

Are your lot still gorging on chocolate after the Easter weekend?

Many kids across the country are probably only coming down from their sugar high now but one expert has recommended that only older children get Easter eggs.

Dr Becky Spelman wants children under four years of age to be banned from having chocolate eggs at Easter as overeating now can set up a lifetime of bad habits, she says.

Dr Becky believes that relaxed millenial parents have trouble reigning their kids in when it comes to food.

Kids under four should be banned from having Easter eggs, claims psychologist

“This [Easter] is a nightmare situation for parents of this generation as they have no idea how to teach their children to delay their response to cravings,” she told The Sun.

“This leads children to binge and parents to let them binge as they have no idea how else to deal with the situation.

“Once a child starts overeating behaviour at a young age it’s very hard to turn things around for them in terms of food and their eating habits moving forward, leading to obesity from at very young age.”

This sounds good in theory but would be impossible in practice – imagine the war if the Easter bunny left an egg for your six-year-old but not your three-year-old?!

Kids under four should be banned from having Easter eggs, claims psychologist

Still, there have been calls on these shores for parents to limit the amount of chocolate their kids eat too.

The Irish Heart Foundation warned last week that children’s health is being “unnecessarily compromised by companies whose sole objective is to get them to consume as much chocolate as possible.”

“All this is happening in the midst of a child obesity crisis where children as young as eight are presenting with high blood pressure and young people are showing early signs of heart disease once only seen in middle-aged men.”