Trick-or-treating is an exciting endeavor that kids take upon themselves every year on the evening of October 31st. To celebrate the holiday festivities of Halloween, children dress up in costumes and loot the town of its candy by going door to door and asking for a treat. The idea behind all of this is a good one, especially if you are an anxious child eager to collect. There is, however, a problem that arises from taking candy from strangers. It is quite impossible to be absolutely certain if candy has or hasn’t been tampered with. Wouldn’t it be terrible if your son or daughter ingested some illegal or poisonous substance because some sick psycho thought it would be funny to put junk in the candy they handed out to the trick-or-treaters? There is nothing wrong with kids going out on this holiday and participating in all of the fun, but knowing how to check the candy your child gets to make sure that it is safe is the only way to protect them from anything like this ever happening to them. Here are some ways to check to make sure that the candy they get is safe.
First off, set your child down and lay some rules down before they go out trick-or-treating. Make it clear that they are to not eat any of the candy they get from strangers. Explain to them why they are taking this precaution and what you want to do with the candy when their night comes to a close. If children know what the risks and concerns are beforehand, they will be more obedient to your counsel rather than if you just simply said, “you better not eat that candy ‘til I see it!” Most kids would just think that you want to eat the best stuff and leave them with the cinnamon fireballs.
When they walk through the door with their bags of candy, round them all up and put each kid with a big person to help them look through all of their candy. Take each bag and dump the candy out onto the ground. Spread the candy out flat so that all of the pieces are easily visible. Go through each piece and separate the sealed wrappers and the unsealed wrappers. The sealed candy should be safe, so put it back into the bag. Next, spread out all of the unsealed pieces of candy again so that they can be viewed a second time. Many candies come from the factory unsealed, such as Tootsie-Rolls and Smarties. If there are candies that should have been sealed but are now ripped open, throw them away. A candy that is exposed like this could have easily been tampered with by a mischievous prankster. Don’t take the chance on your own child. Next, look at the remaining unsealed candy that would have been unsealed already and inspect the state of the wrappers and how the candy feels. If something feels out of the ordinary, or the wrapper looks like it has been scuffed, or the wrapper is done up strangely, then immediately throw it out. Again, it would be easy for someone to unroll the candy, tamper with it, then roll it back up. It is unlikely, however, that they would successfully wrap it back up to its factory-wrapped look.
These are the basic ways of checking your child’trick-or-treat candy. Hopefully by doing this it will prevent further problems of innocent children becoming sick from spiked candy. Halloween should be a time of fun and treats and it can be, if safety is first above all else.
