Dad Outraged That His Babysitter Let His 4-Yr-Old Eat 11 Packs Of Gummy Bears—'She Kept Asking For More'
Many feel he's way too concerned about his kid's sugar intake.
Изображения пользователя Helen Sakhnenko | phakimata / Getty Images | Peopleimages.com - YuriArcurs | Canva Pro Nowadays, most parents are trying to do a better job than their parents did, but it often seems like the pendulum has swung really far the other way, leading to a sort of hysteria over everything from kids' safety to their eating habits.
That last one is what one dad is going viral for after his kid's babysitter violated their household food rules. It's hard to argue that he doesn't kind of have a point, but many feel he's taken it way too far — and it's turned into a hilarious bit of online discourse.
The dad is outraged that his babysitter let his kid eat 11 packs of gummy bears.
Okay, yeah, that's insane and absurd, and it's certainly understandable why dad and businessman Brandon Avedikian was a little perturbed at his sitter's dietary choices for his 4-year-old daughter.
He tweeted, "A babysitter allowed our 4-year-old to eat 11 packs of gummy bears today."
@bavedikian / X
"When my wife discovered this, she asked the babysitter why she allowed this to happen," he went on to say. "The response: 'She kept asking for more.'"
It's pretty much the most hilarious response the sitter could have had — something you can imagine out of the playbook of Aubrey Plaza's sarcastic character April from "Parks & Rec."
Obviously, this babysitter needs a bit of a talking-to, right? But that's not what this dad opted for. "I told my wife not to let that babysitter anywhere near our children ever again," he went on to say. "Nobody with that poor of judgment should be trusted with anything of value. Period."
Okay, dude, I feel you, but hear me out: They're gummy bears, not crack cocaine! And many online felt like the whole thing didn't add up.
It turned out it was 11 tiny Costco gummy bear packages — and some doubted whether the kid even actually ate them all.
As often happens whenever something sort of silly pops off on Twitter, especially where parenting is concerned, internet folks quickly went on a reconnaissance mission to figure out exactly what was going on here.
Exhibit A! In a reply to a commenter, the dad revealed that they were 11 packs from a Costco bulk box of gummy bears. Those packs are tiny! Teeny, tiny, even. One Twitter user, writer, and editor, Lucy Huber, even went so far as to get her own box of Costco bulk gummy bears and count how many were in each package in a series of hilarious posts.
After her expert analysis of three emptied-out packs uncovered a total of 19 gummy bears — roughly 6 bears per pack —suddenly, the dad's outrage seemed a bit overboard.
Sure, no 4-year-old should be eating 66 gummy bears in a sitting — we all agree on this. No adult should either! Probably! I am not a doctor!
But still, is this the type of offense that warrants dragging a babysitter in front of a tribunal so she can answer for her crimes? They're just gummy bears!
Especially since, as another X user very astutely pointed out — how can we even be sure this dad's kid is the one who actually ate the 11 packs of gummy bears in question? As anyone who's ever babysat knows, eating your clients out of house and home is half the appeal of the job. "Obviously the babysitter ate a lot of gummy bears and just claimed it was the 4yo eating all of them," the X user said. J'accuse, babysitter! J'accuse!
Others thought the dad's outsized reaction spoke to a more serious trend —parents giving their kids food issues by being too strict about their diets.
As yet another parent on X put it, "The science is conclusive: restricting and monitoring kids’ food intake is absolutely the number one thing you can do to ensure they will paradoxically fixate on it, possibly for life."
This dad and his wife definitely seem to fit the profile of this type of parent. "You’d be hard-pressed to find a house that eats healthier than ours," he wrote in another tweet, "but we do allow our kids to have 1 pack of organic gummy bears per day." Oh wow, how decadent!
Of course, it's hard to blame them. Millennials and Gen X kids were not only basically left to run feral, eating nothing but Fruit By The Foot and candy cigarettes all day, but they also grew up in a media environment steeped in wildly damaging body image and health messaging. What parent wouldn't want to shield their kid as much as possible?
But the X users who called out the paradoxically harmful effects of this are correct. Studies have shown time and time again that making an issue of a kid's diet, divvying it up into "good foods" and "bad foods" and placing value judgments on what they eat can actually CAUSE the food issues that lead to everything from obesity to eating disorders.
It also often results in kids going hog-wild on "bad foods" when their parents aren't around — another thing many suspected might be at play in this gummy bears debacle.
This dad and his wife surely have the best intentions, and allowing a kid to eat 11 packs of gummy bears is indisputably insane babysitter behavior. (Which, to my mind, lends even more credence to the theory that it was SHE who ate them in the first place!) But as with so many things, it's probably not this serious. Let the kid eat her gummy bears. It'll all work out in the end!
John Sundholm is a news and entertainment writer who covers pop culture, social justice, and human interest topics.