The diet of our children is often a area of concern, in this article we look at the tricky subject of autistic kids and chocolate.

Autism and healthy eating

Most parents of autistic children will relate to the fact that our kids often have limited diets.

These limitations at times can be in the form of colour, texture or something like sweetness.

In our house the achilles heel of a healthy diet is chocolate. Our daughter with autism can’t get enough of the stuff.

To provide a bit of context she has never eaten a piece of fruit in her life, nor something basic like a sandwich.

She knows what she likes and likes what she knows.

The problems arise however when we try and limit her access to chocolate, ration it to a degree.

We afterall want her to keep all her teeth and live a healthy lifestyle so have been on a campaign to address this desire.

Whilst like with everything with autism it is a work in progress but there has been improvements.

With that in mind I thought I’d share how we have tackled the issue.

Taking chocolate out of reach

This will be incredibly obvious for anyone reading, but it was our first step.

Our daughter had recognised where the chocolate was kept a long time ago and had started helping herself.

When she did it the first time my wife and I laughed.

Our daughter is afterall underweight and her grabbing a small piece of chocolate wasn’t too alarming.

But then it turned into a habit and then a routine and as we know routines can be hard to break.

So a key step for us was to move the location of the chocolate. We didn’t want to cause a meltdown so we did so quite tactically.

Firstly we moved her absolute favourite chocolate and then went on a sliding scale from there.

Eventually she was left opening the cupboard to find chocolate covered peanuts, something she doesn’t like.

We moved them and were over the first step.

Offer chocolate at set times

My wife and I recognised that we would have to be a bit more sensible about the chocolate moving forward.

In short we couldn’t buckle and end up rewarding our daughter too often.

We decided that the only time she would be able to have chocolate was when she had eaten all of her preceding meal.

This took some time to sink in but gradually she reduced asking for it at other times.

Have less appealing chocolate

Our daughter goes crazy for Kinder bars. It’s one of the few things that I think she would eat until she made herself ill.

Now we didn’t want to punish her of course but at the same time if we were going to reduce the chocolate we should move away from her favourites.

We started to incorporate more chocolate biscuits. I am no dietitian but I assume chocolate biscuits are not quite as sugar full as regular chocolate.

So in summary we had reduced her access to the treats, installed set times for having them and steered her away from pure chocolate where possible.

Why do autistic children love chocolate?

Sharing our story in support group of ten sets of parents it became clear that nearly everyone was in the same boat.

All of the other parents said their kids went mad for chocolate.

Crisps (potato chips), cakes, biscuits, pizza and alike were all popular but there was nothing as universally popular as chocolate.

That led me to consider why that is the case.

The obvious reason is that it’s tasty. Most neuro-typical people have a keen appetite for chocolate.

But for autistic children I think it also brings some consistency.

If you say compared it to potato chips or something cooked there are various with these foodstuffs.

Potato chips are in very different shapes, also the sharp corners may put off some autistic kids with oral sensitivity.

When it comes to cooked treats like burgers, french fries and pizza then they are not as consistent as chocolate either.

Sometimes they are more cooked than others leading to variation in texture and taste.

But not chocolate.

If it is a bar (of kinder or similar) then it is identical every time.

Our children know what to expect and they expect it to be good. It’s no surprise that they are so keen.

Summary – Autistic Kids and Chocolate

With no science to back me up I am going to assume that nearly all autistic kids love chocolate.

This does bring problems however as tasks like brushing our children’s teeth can be a challenge.

If your child is a chocolate addict then there are various ways to wean them off. Give some of our tactics a go or perhaps reach out to Facebook groups.

Any tips or ideas?

We would love to hear from you if you have got any techniques or ideas for our readers to try.

Be sure to leave a comment if any of the above has helped or if you have any ideas we can add to this article.

Also be sure to search for any other articles you might find helpful.

Try for example searching below for topics like ‘meltdown’ or ‘communication’.