I saw Dwayne The Rock Johnson’s Easter post on Instagram (photo above) but I thought it was just a typical cute Easter photo as I didn’t read the caption. Then I saw on People that he doesn’t give his daughters, Jasmine, three, or Tiana, one, any candy for Easter and instead gives toys. Their cousins were visiting too and they all got toys instead of candy as well. I’m including the full caption below and the relevant part is that he put out 100 eggs for Jasmine and her cousins but wrote that they’re “all filled with tiny toys… no candy when you come to the Rock’s house.” That’s interesting, here’s what he wrote:
If you look right there, you’ll find what the Easter Daddy, I mean Bunny left you.
100 eggs for Jazzy & her cousins for their hunt – all filled with tiny toys.
No candy when you come to the Rock’s house – last thing I need is wrangling a bunch whacked out kiddos who’ve become candy crack heads on the sugar come down 👼🏼👉🏾👹
We had such a fun Easter with our ohana and hope you guys did too.
Lets get back to work.
I don’t know if it came through but in the original post he used am emoji for an angel, followed by a finger pointing, then a devil, which is so cute and can definitely be true. Kids can freak out and then crash on sugar. However Easter is the holiday featuring my favorite candy in the world, which is jelly beans! Chocolate is a close second. So the eggs at our house this year contained the typical fare like mini Snickers, mini Heath bars, Jelly Bellies (the best) and Andes candies (underrated classic). My son is a teenager and I asked him which candy he wanted but I also bought stuff I would eat. I already put it all in baggies and stuck it in the freezer, that’s my trick for getting myself to slow down eating candy. In my son’s Easter basket I added some little toy gifts, like a Spiderman washcloth, but he’s really too old for that and it was just nostalgia on my part. My god it goes so fast.
As for The Rock’s stance I get it I guess. He’s very into health and fitness, but he often has cheat meals with sugar in them. I don’t understand why he doesn’t give his kids (at least Jasmine, Tiana may be too young) at least a little bit of chocolate and jelly beans for Easter. Like maybe 10 out of 100 eggs could have candy in them. Did they at least get cake that day? I would love to know.
Dwayne also posted this photo of the little display his private flight staff made for him to honor his Time 100 cover. I saw this and found it touching. He’s on a flight with a fully made up bed behind him, the ultimate in ultra rich people perks, but he still looks so grateful and happy to be honored. That’s part of the reason why we love him.
Oh hey Jason Statham. I’m so seeing that ridiculous movie they’re in together, Hobbs and Shaw! It’s not out until August though.
Embed from Getty Images
I’m sorry to Hecate for covering The Rock as she loves him! I just couldn’t resist talking about candy.
I rarely had candy as kid, I do like it but it’s not something that i crave everyday, but I have friends and coworkers who are always eating candy , bread, or donuts.
Yeah I do think there is something to kids growing up eating candy and having a sweet tooth or sugar addiction as adults. I certainly have one. Sugar IS addictive. So while some may see it as militant to not give your kids candy or sugar I see the POV of why some parents choose not to.
The thing is you can’t hide sugar from them forever. They will eat it at school or a friend’s house. As adults they’ll probably binge on it. If it’s forbidden, they will want to try it more. I say a good balance is a better option…but I really have no say in this because I don’t have kids. What do I know.
I totally agree. I didn’t have it when I was younger except for special occasions. I distinctly remember going over to a friends house after school one time in elementary and her mom giving us a bowl of M&Ms for a snack and I was like, what the heck! We never got that stuff. Also, this was the first year I let my three and a half year olds eat candy for Easter. My five, almost six, year old has had candy in the past for Halloween or a special treat but he cannot handle it at all so that’s one reason why we keep it far away from this house. Some kids just can’t handle it and he’s one of them, the twins can handle it better then him but we just keep it away. I would never want a house full of kids like my son so I understand.
@ Mel M
I have nieces so I know what kids full of sugar is like…insane ! I agree some kids can’t handle it. I do wonder how these kids will handle sugar as adults though.
I think you can do balance without yielding to EVERY societal expectation to give your kids sugar. Things like easter egg hunts or halloween trick-or-treating can turn into total sugar free-for-alls and I think it’s fine to limit those.
We don’t keep sweets at home, mostly because *I* am a sugar addict and having stuff like candy, chocolate, etc. in the house is hard for me. If there’s a party, my son is totally allowed to have cake, chips, etc. But they aren’t for just mindlessly consuming or having as an everyday snack. We keep lots of healthy and tasty foods at home and are teaching him to cook and be involved in the kitchen.
It wouldn’t surprise me if he does eventually go through a junk food binge period, but my hope is that we will have given him a good foundation of healthy eating so he’ll have some kind of framework to come back to when he realizes the junk food isn’t doing it for him.
@me- I think it could go either way. Like I said I never had candy growing up unless it was a special occasion and I’m fine with it now. I’ll eat it and I like it but I don’t go out of my way to have it. My husband on the other hand had so much candy in the house growing up all the time. Like full sized candy bars. He still has a sweet tooth and would love to always have candy in the house. I know when he goes to the store on his own or I ask him to get one sweet thing he will totally over do it. His dad still has a huge sweet tooth too and is always looking for candy when he comes over here even though we never have it.
Also, we have a lot of cousins that let their kids eat candy and have pop whenever and all of those kids have gotten so many cavities in their baby teeth and they are constantly asking for cookie and sweets for snacks. So I took a cue from them and decided to go the opposite direction.
@ Cate
I love the fact you are teaching your son how to cook. So many young men never learn or are never taught it. They grow up only seeing their mothers and sisters in the kitchen.
I had whole food, garden veggies, farm fresh everything as a tiny kid. Fast forward to divorced parents & life in a food desert barrio. Then it was nothing but “food like substance” until I was a teenager and left home. I struggled to get back to that original palate, it’s really socio-economic. My kiddo has access to good food so he eats and likes it. I give him holiday candy, then secretly slowly throw it out so he doesn’t feel deprived, but not addicted either. It’s a journey that wealthy parents can more easily navigate.
I dunno man. I had free and easy access to candy (yay for 80s parents!) and I don’t care at all about it.
But- I do have a sugar issue it’s just carbs and wine.
So-no shade to him for delaying it. But I had friends who were denied all “candy” and they were teenage candy crack heads for sure.
Bread and donuts…yes ! Candy I can do without. But does chocolate count as “candy”? I’m not into jelly beans, sour patch kids, and any of those types of candies but I gotta have chocolate.
We never had sweets as kids and until today I hardly ever crave it. My sister however binges on sugar regularly. So it depends…
as long as he vaccinates them…
YES
Haha yes!
I’m am so excited for their movie together. Ridiculously excited.
I don’t think it was about him never giving them candy so much as about this particular occasion. He stated that he didnt want to wrangle a bunch of kids hopped up on sugar. So I think it was more about that than him being against giving his kids sugar at all.
I am also a candy crack head, and I am really old. Le sigh.
I need to do this. My three year old is bugging me 4-5 times a day to eat his Easter candy. We only got him 4-5 small pieces but he came home with tons of candy from his (secular!) school. So annoying.
I feel so lucky that my daughters class has a no candy hand out rule. It makes it so much easier. My son who is in the same grade separate class has none such rule and luckily I can explain its not fair for him to keep it because his sister has none. Luckily twins like fair play rules so he just hands it over.
School shouldn’t hand out tons of candy. It drives me nuts. I’m not looking forward to next year. Who knows if their teachers will have a no candy rule or not.
I think it’s reasonable. We didn’t bother getting Easter candy for my three-year-old because my parents sent him a chocolate bunny, which is already about 5x as much chocolate as I’m comfortable with him having on a single day as a treat. More would have been overkill. My dad was then giving me a hard time for allowing my son to eat the ears on Easter after dinner, and saving the rest for a later day, apparently that makes me the Easter Grinch.
Meanwhile, my nephew (age 2) went to the neighborhood Easter egg hunt at my parents neighborhood and my SIL was complaining to me later that he was a total crankypants all afternoon, probably because of the candy, which of course my parents had been “encouraging” (i.e. pressuring) her to let him eat.
We put little party favors (squishies and rubix cubes) inside my daughter’s Easter eggs, and they had a great time. Didn’t miss the candy at all. I made a strawberry-banana loaf cake, and they each got a glitter wand, a little book about bunnies, and a Minecraft plush. They were very happy, played all night.
I don’t never let them have candy, but I try to be careful with it.
I didn’t at all give candy to kiddo until he was much older. We were lucky to have a garden where he grazed. Kids love fresh growing things.
Candy is definitely my sweet tooth weakness. I’m not a huge cookie/cake/baked goods person. I have to be in the mood to go after them. But slap a box of Hot Tamales down in front of me, and I’ll eat the whole thing in twenty minutes. It’s a hard addiction to live with. Totally devastating.
BTW, there’s no real “high/crash” on candy. Sucrose (sugar) is a carb. It’ll process the same way as any other carb. Where it’s likely to make you feel awful is if you’re not eating anything else simply because all of that fat and high processed sugar can be hard on the body because it’s easily converted into glucose, and your body has to respond to a sudden increase in glucose levels. The only people who need to worry about sugar levels after eating candy are diabetics. Otherwise, your body very carefully regulates your circulating glucose levels and will release insulin into the bloodstream to drive uptake into cells and/or glycogen production in the liver to offset excessive production. It has little effect on behavior.
I’m addicted to sugar and was as a little kid, also. My mom had to hide my Easter and Halloween candy and only allow one piece a day. I remember as a kid the intense cravings when I’d see candy, or if someone else was eating it, it was a physical response in my body, it was weird. Luckily my mom raised me with good manners so I knew it wasn’t nice to steal it out of people’s hands, but I wanted to. LOL I know I’m not the norm, I still struggle to this day, that’s why I’m keto, keeps it under control.
I didn’t give my kid a lot of sugar, just in case he was like me. He’s not, thankfully.
Easter Daddy, lmao. Sometimes this approach can backfire. When I was little, I was friends with a girl whose parents didn’t keep sweets in the house and never allowed her to have any. Consequently, when she came over, she’d guzzle pop and eat all of our junk food as if her life depended on it. She’d also buy tons of candy when we got a little older and would spend all day out on our bikes.
I grew up with access to all of that and I don’t even like sweet stuff now! So, I dunno. Individual taste is a factor, but I think an out and out ban on some things can make some people want it even more when they’re old enough to make their own decisions.
My kids did an Easter egg hunt w/ candy in the eggs and the sugar crash is real. Cut to a couple hours later peeling my son off the floor of a rest stop (where we stopped on the drive home) because he was having a meltdown. Tiny toys sounds like a lot of annoying plastic junk though. Hmm there’s gotta be a third alternative we can do next year…
We don’t have egg-hunting for Easter where I come from, so this all sounds bit much for me. The Rock with 100 eggs! Yes, that’d be crazy with candy, but it sounds really excessive with all that plastic rubbish too.
We’d always have a chocolate egg or 2 and then a yummy dessert for Easter as kids, and we were really happy with that. Difficult to introduce new traditions for kids though – they really insist on those traditions!
But perhaps you could e.g. have a hunt where they collect eggs (which are empty) and then if they find an X amount they get a prize?
He is right. More than two toddlers on candy are like a hurricane you are left to deal with on your own.
We also don’t do candy. We give little toys, fill their baskets with stuff they can use (coloring books, new crayons) and just put little puppets, cars, trains stickers and tattoos in the basket. My kids get candy as a treat every so often but never ask for it. I’m not a candy person so I don’t even think about it and I didn’t grow up eating a ton of candy. They would rather have cake anyway if given a choice.
Maybe it’s just me but the candy crack head naming just seemed inappropriate and insensitive to anyone fighting a crack addiction
I think its good to limit sugar to kids. I had a lot of candy and sweets and sugar growing up, and I still have such a sweet tooth to this day. I also at one point had 6 cavaties at one time as a child, it was painful and getting fillings was even more painful. I still remember being at the dentist to this day, it scarred me. I religiously brush my teeth after eating sweets now haha.