One in Four Parents Have Made the Same Holiday Threat

A mom asked a question this week that has stayed with me. Her three little kids are eight, seven, and five and a half. There are older kids in the house too — a daughter of 21 and a son of 16.

All month, the little ones have not been listening. The mornings are loud and stressful, in an apartment with neighbors below who do not like the noise. They argue over every tiny thing. They are late for school even though school is a fifteen-minute walk. Two days ago they broke their big sister’s DVD case — a library movie she was supposed to return that day.

Here is how she put it: “I am exhausted. Mentally and physically tired and drained. I feel weak. And it is 80% because of them.”

This is her family’s first month in their own apartment, in a safe neighborhood. It would be the first time these kids have ever gone trick-or-treating. Her older two talked her into it. Her 16-year-old wants to go, and he wants his little brother and sisters to go with him.

And all month she has been saying the sentence a lot of us say in October: keep this up, and I am returning your costumes. No trick-or-treating. Now the night is close, the behavior has not changed, and she is asking strangers if she would be wrong to mean it.

If you have little kids and a hard month behind you, you probably know this exact spot. You are not short on love. You are short on things left to take away.

Let us start with us, the parents, because the research does.

A national poll from the C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital asked 725 parents of children ages 1 to 5 about discipline. Parents of 3-to-5-year-olds used threats the most. About 1 in 4 had told their child that Santa or the gifts would not come.

Halloween has a costume instead of a Santa, but it is the same move. When the small consequences stop working, we reach for the biggest day we can see on the calendar.

The poll made one calm point about threats, and it is the point this whole question turns on. An empty threat does not work for long, because the child learns the threat is empty — and then we have lost trust we will need later.

Her costume threat has now been running for a month. The mornings did not get quieter in that month. That is not because the threat is too small. It is because a night that is still weeks away is too far away for a five-year-old to think about at seven in the morning, while she is arguing about her shoes.

And if you wonder whether the rest of us do better — we do not. Only about half of the parents in that poll said they are very consistent with discipline. Nearly a fourth admitted the real problem out loud: we get too irritated, we react before we remember our own plan, or we are simply too tired to follow through.

So this mom is not failing a test the rest of us pass. She is the average parent in the poll, in the hardest month of her family’s year.

Most things we take away can be handed back. Take a toy, and you can return it on Monday when things calm down. The consequence ends. The toy comes back. Life goes on.

Trick-or-treating does not work like that. It happens on one night. If her kids miss it, there is no Monday where she can hand it back. The next chance is a full year away — and for a child who is five, a year is a long piece of being alive.

It is also not connected to the behavior, and connected is what teaches. The loud mornings are real. The lateness is real. But Halloween night did not cause any of it, and cancelling Halloween fixes none of it. The mornings will still be loud on November first. They will just be loud in a house where something else got taken too.

And it is not only the little kids’ night. Her son is 16. He asked for this. He wants to walk his little brother and sisters around their new neighborhood, in their costumes, for the first time. Cancelling the night takes it from him too — and he is one of the kids who behaved.

You can give back a toy on Monday. You cannot give back a first Halloween.

I am a dad of six. My kids are 9, 9, 13, 16, 19, and 20. So I know what an October looks like when you are outnumbered. And I know the sentence this mom has been saying, because some version of it has come out of my mouth too.

I grew up with a father who was harsh, and I decided a long time ago I would do this differently. Firm, not soft. No violence. But firm can slide. When I am tired, my consequences get bigger, not smarter. A whole month of loud mornings can turn a good parent into someone shopping for the biggest consequence on the calendar. I know, because that shopper is me some nights.

My 13-year-old told me once that our talks turn into disasters because I talk a lot and do not listen. The agreement he and I are writing together exists for this exact reason — the consequences get written down on a calm day, with his vote in them, instead of being invented by me on a bad night. It is not signed yet. It is an experiment. I wrote about where I draw the line on punishment here: Where Do You Draw the Line on Punishment for a Young Child? (https://blog.thefamilyground.com/p/where-to-draw-line-on-punishment) The short version is that a small consequence, close to the moment, teaches more than a big one handed out when I am upset.

I keep coming back to a line from my own life: guidance is not the same as control. I cannot control how loud three little kids are at seven in the morning. I can guide my part — deciding on the calm days which days are simply not for sale.

Most of us judge a threat by whether the kids finally listen. This one has had a whole month to work, and the mornings are still loud. By that measure it already failed — weeks ago.

What the month of threatening did do is hang over the house. The kids heard “no Halloween” so many times that it stopped being a consequence and became weather. And the family has already lost one Halloween event this month — her 16-year-old wanted to go to a family Halloween event, and they never made it, because the little kids made everyone late. The punishment, in a way, already happened once. Nothing got better.

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1. Take the big days off the table before the hard month starts. Birthdays. Halloween. The holiday morning. In our house I am trying to settle it early and say it out loud: these days belong to the family, and they do not get spent as punishment. What is left is everything else — small, daily, fixable things. This is not a magic fix. My first draft of any punishment is still too big. I am still bad at catching it before the sentence leaves my mouth.

2. Make the consequence fit the morning, not the month. Her real problems are loud mornings, fighting, and being late. Those have fixes that live in the morning. Shoes and clothes laid out the night before. Out the door ten minutes earlier — fifteen minutes of walking is not the problem; the last five minutes inside the house are. And when something breaks, the consequence is the repair: they broke their big sister’s DVD case, so they say sorry to her, and they help make it right with the library. A child can connect that. She cannot connect it to a night five weeks away.

3. If you already said it, you are allowed to unsay it — out loud. If the costume sentence has been hanging over your house for weeks, a parent can say: I said that when I was tired. We are going. Here is what we are working on instead. That is not weakness, and the kids will not read it as weakness. They will read it as the truth — and a parent whose word bends toward fair is a parent whose word still means something when it has to.

One clear note: I am a dad, not an expert. A hard month in a brand-new home, with a move behind you and neighbors below you, would stretch any parent. But if a child is struggling in a bigger way — hard days everywhere, not just at home, more than other kids his age — that is a talk for his doctor and his teachers, not a blog post. Asking early is a strength, not a failure.

For most behavior, no. It happens once a year, it is not connected to what the child did, and for a young child it sits too far away to teach anything about the morning’s behavior. The C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital National Poll found about 1 in 4 parents of 3- to 5-year-olds had threatened that Santa or the gifts would not come, and the poll’s guidance is that consequences teach best when they are immediate and tied to the act itself.

Yes — but keep it close to the behavior, and make it repair something. If they broke a sister’s DVD case, the consequence is an apology and helping to make it right. If mornings are late and loud, the consequence is an earlier start and a calmer routine the kids helped set. Consequences that fix the actual problem teach; consequences that only remove a far-away good day mostly teach a child to resent it.

Yes, and saying why is the strongest part. Tell them you spoke when you were tired, that Halloween is back on, and what the smaller, connected consequence is instead. Children learn from watching a parent correct a sentence that was too big. Changing an unfair threat does not spoil them; it protects your word for the times you truly mean it.

• r/Parenting — “Taking away trick or treating as punishment?” (a mom of kids ages 8, 7, and five and a half — with a 21-year-old daughter and a 16-year-old son at home — in her family’s first month in their own apartment, asking whether to cancel her little kids’ first-ever trick-or-treating after a month of not listening, loud mornings, and lateness; captured in the 2026-10-26 watch-only scan — nothing is posted on Reddit): reddit.com/r/Parenting/comments/1xfu242 (https://www.reddit.com/r/Parenting/comments/1xfu242/)

• C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital National Poll on Children’s Health, discipline report (surveyed August 2024, released December 16, 2024; 725 parents of children ages 1 to 5): only about half of parents said they are very consistent with discipline; parents of 3- to 5-year-olds used threats the most, with about 1 in 4 threatening that Santa or gifts would not come; nearly a fourth of parents admitted getting too irritated, reacting before remembering their plan, or being too tired to follow through; the poll’s guidance is that empty threats undermine trust and consequences should be immediate and connected to the behavior: medicalxpress.com — National poll suggests many parents rely on threats to manage misbehavior (https://medicalxpress.com/news/2024-12-national-poll-parents-threats-misbehavior.html)

So should she take them trick-or-treating? The costumes are already bought. The neighborhood is safe, for the first time. Her teenager is asking to walk his little brother and sisters around it. Take them. Fix the mornings in the mornings — they are smaller problems than a first Halloween. A year from now, nobody in that house will remember the loud mornings. Those three kids will remember the night they finally went.

— Amam