Centrist Dad

I have failed my son by passing on my sweet habit

With his son going under the dentist’s drill, Will Gore feels severe parental guilt

Sunday 22 October 2023 06:30 BST
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The Candy Man can, and will, ruin your teeth
The Candy Man can, and will, ruin your teeth (Getty Images)

As a parent, it’s easy to beat yourself up when things don’t go well for your children. Flunked a spelling test? Probably should have helped them practice. Struggle to make polite conversation with new people? We must have failed with their early socialisation. Son eventually realises he won’t turn pro at football? Well, I have warned him about that one.

Food failures have been high on our guilt agenda. We started well with both our offspring: one of my daughter’s first meals after moving onto solids was a pork and cider casserole. Maybe, as it turns out, it was too much, too soon. By the age of five or six, she was a desperately fussy eater; and only now, nearly a decade later, is she expanding her repertoire away from fish fingers, pizza and Quorn nuggets.

Our son also started well, and never quite descended the fussiness depths; but he may still be on that trajectory, with his favoured foods mostly varieties of wrap. Between meals he’s a snacker, and bolshy with it: we have been successfully brow-beaten by his demands for Bear Yoyos, biscuits and sweets too often than I care to think about.

Mostly, we blame ourselves for our bad parenting. Sometimes we blame the kids for being monsters. Then we go back to blaming ourselves. Where was Supernanny when we needed her.

Naturally we always took care to ensure our kids brushed their teeth, especially our sweet-loving son. But once they were old enough to do it by themselves, perhaps we were too lax about monitoring their effectiveness. Sometimes we’d send our son back to do his again, but there were other times when we couldn’t face the fight, or the prospect of being late for school.

Anyway, the chickens have now come home to roost: the boy requires a filling. You might say it’s the icing on the cake of our poor parenting: but both the cake and the icing have been eaten by our son.

When the dentist first told us of his concern, we were mortified. If only our middle-class son had been stuffing himself with olives and manchego cheese rather than jelly babies, this might never have happened.

We immediately upgraded to an electric toothbrush and set two-minute timers on Alexa to ensure there could be no doubt about the adequacy of the cleaning. Sweets were reduced to a minimum. The dentist gave us a three-month window to see if the area of softness might re-harden. Alas, it did not and so this week our poor boy, with his mouth full of decay, goes under the drill.

And the truth is, while I blame his mother for his lack of pro-footballer genes, this one is definitely on me. As a sweet addict, I’m the parent who endlessly buys fizzy watermelons, wine gums and Tangfastics “for the children”. I’m the one who introduced them to the joys of pick’n’mix, and who would invariably say yes to requests for Tic Tacs whenever we happened to be filling up at a petrol station. It’s daddy who has a photo of a Swizzels Refresher on his Instagram profile.

How I’ve managed to avoid fillings myself is something of a mystery. Sweets were not in quite such plentiful supply in my own childhood as there have been for my kids; but it’s hardly as if I was an ascetic. There were always custard creams knocking about our house, and my grandparents usually had a full bowl of Werther’s Originals when we went round after school. Maybe my luck will run out at some point.

Unsurprisingly, my son is anxious; eight-year-olds being notoriously unrelaxed about the prospect of injections in their gums. He also told me he didn’t like the idea of the filling being in his mouth forever, which only served to heighten my guilt. Then again, if he carries on guzzling sweets with names like “Toxic Waste”, he might end up having the whole tooth out, filling and all.

When he gets into the dentist’s chair, I’m sure he’ll be brave. And once he’s back on solid food, I’ll offer a combined reward and apology by taking him out for lunch. But no pudding.

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