Happily promoting childhood obesity

There was a debate a few weeks back in our library system about giving children and teens candy for incentives. ONE patron complained and then a whole uproar of intelligent, terse, angry, and sometimes pompous e-mails were exchanged across all the libraries. Everyone had an opinion on the subject. One claimed we were making them sugar addicts and others claimed we were promoting childhood obesity. (Never mind that we were giving them out sparingly, one piece at a time and only for good behavior.)

No one ever stopped to ask the children and teens what they thought of this reward system. So in the last few weeks I have done my own informal survey of the children, mothers of children and teens in my library. At storytimes I sometimes have edible crafts. The other week we decorated cookies. I asked mothers what they thought of this and some of the other crafts. They all thought it was great and had no problem with it. I asked the children and between mouthfuls of cookie they thought it was wonderful and were eager to come to more storytimes. I also asked a number of teens what they thought of the candy incentives. I asked them if they would prefer a bookmark, or healthy snacks which were other alternatives suggested in the flurry of e-mails. I liked the response of one teen who comes in very regularly. He looked at me disgustedly and said "Hell no!"