Did you check kids’ candy for razor blades? Most NJ parents do

A dental company surveyed over a thousand Americans with children about Halloween candy and some interesting statistics came out.

After a dental accident caused by candy we spend an average of $538.28 fixing our teeth.

Jawbreakers, Jolly Ranchers, and Bit-O-Honey are the most dangerous Halloween candy for your teeth.

But it’s what parents do with their kids’ Halloween candy that really caught my eye.

40% of parents take away some of their kids’ candy to prevent them from having too much.

21% throw out their kids’ candy after a couple weeks.

But this one! 55% of parents painstakingly go through their kids’ Halloween candy looking to see if it was tampered with in the form of razor blades or drugs.

Seriously?

Some people have been buying into too many urban legends. Candy tampering is far more rare than people realize. According to Wikipedia…

Joel Best, a sociologist at the University of Delaware specializes in the scholarly study of candy-tampering legends. He collected newspaper reports from 1958 to 1983 in search of evidence of candy tampering. Fewer than 90 instances might have qualified as actual candy tampering. In none of the cases does he attribute the events to "random attempts to harm children" during the Halloween holiday. Instead, most cases were attempts by adults to gain financial compensation or, far more commonly, by children to get attention.

They make for great stories. But candy tampering just isn’t really a thing in any big way. Yet helicopter parents are forensically going through bags of Milky Ways looking for any hint of a madman.

Perhaps us parents are the madmen for buying into it.

Opinions expressed in the post above are those of New Jersey 101.5 talk show host Jeff Deminski only.

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