Why are children obsessed with the forbidden?

“Dad, can I have a trickortreat today?” These are, more or less unfailingly, the first words out of my four-year-old son’s mouth at half six in the morning. A “trickortreat,” in his happy rhyming slang, is a sweet, so named because of the indelible impression that Halloween made on him. On that night, my children went through the backstreets of East Finchley like a swarm of confectionery-crazed locusts. We have buckets of sweets; literally, buckets. Two of them: one purple, one orange.

“Rrghghhgbrorryshup,” is my reply.

“Dad, can I? Can I maybe?”

“Maybe. Ok. Maybe. NaSHUP.”

“…”

“[zzzz]”

“…”

“[zzzz]”

“Dad?”

“[zzzz]”

“DAD?”

“WHA’”

“Dad, when can I watch Pork Patrol?”

“It’s called Paw Patrol, and I don’t know, okay? Please stop asking me.”

And on it goes. He’s relentless. No messing about. No “good morning.” The day’s, and if he gets on a roll the whole week’s, ration of treats will be negotiated up front, first thing in the morning. Or, at least, the groundwork for later negotiation is established.

“No,” is regarded as an opening gambit, to be converted at once into “I’ll think about it,” or “I’m not making any promises,” or “maybe” in the interests of two or three more minutes of parental peace. And come 4pm, the mental ledger will be extracted and that “maybe” will be weaponised.

How on earth is one supposed to deal with this stuff? Being uptight middle-class parents, we are in general opposed to the idea of our children binge-eating confectionery; likewise its televisual equivalent. Sweets, we intone piously, are a treat, to be consumed singly and only after meals on weekends; just as screen time is a privilege.

And yet—by that peculiar logic whereby anything forbidden becomes infinitely more desirable—the kids are obsessed with sweets and television. Which means, in turn, that they become ever more central to daily life. Since both physical violence and locking children in basements is frowned on, and Kantian moral logic doesn’t work on four-year-olds, my main if not only disciplinary resource is a vague threat.

“Brush your teeth and you can have a toffee. No, not after brushing your teeth. One day,” or: “Stop punching each other or all of your sweets will be thrown in the bin. I’m serious. I won’t pick them out and wash the coffee grounds off them like last time.” You can imagine how well this works. And the escalatory logic of it means that the backstop threat, in other words the cancellation of Christmas, is routinely trotted out in order to persuade my daughter to let us brush her hair in the morning. Once she calls my bluff on that, we’re sunk: might as well call social services and be done with it.

It is my dearest wish to raise a tribe of little Calvinists: children who regard a pleasure deferred as a pleasure redoubled, and a pleasure denied as a pleasure absolute. I restrict treats for just such a reason. And, thanks to what Freudians call “the return of the repressed,” I have achieved completely the opposite effect.

In theory, therefore, what I should do is sit the children down first thing every morning with their own weight in Haribo and a Peppa Pig omnibus—that, surfeiting, the appetite may sicken and so die. But I can’t bring myself to do that. I have a hunch that the appetite may be more robust than advertised.

So it’s “Dad, Dad, Dad” and “Trickortreat, trickortreat, trickortreat.” All day long. It’s exhausting. By the time the kids are in bed, all we have the energy for is settling down to binge-watch rubbish on Netflix; my wife with the orange bucket on her lap, and me with the purple.