Candy wars and sexy costumes: Top 5 Halloween parenting tips

How old is too old to trick-or-treat? What if your teen wants to wear a sexy costume to a Halloween party?

Negotiating Halloween with kids can be a tricky business, so Alyson Schafer, a family therapist and parenting author, has five tips for making it through murky waters on Oct. 31.

1. Older kid wants to trick-or-treat? Let them

"In my humble opinion, if you've got the chutzpah to go pull together a costume and go out and knock on the door, I don't care how old you are. I don't care that your voice is cracking and you've got pimples.

We spend so much time complaining that our youth are wasting their time in the basement or at the mall or hanging out on their iPad, and here's this opportunity to do something that's still play-like, child-like, community-based, innocent. I think we need to support that as long as possible … A lot of young people want permission to be child-like, so if we give them a little nudge and we give them a little support I think they would do it longer."

"But, they've got to put some skin in the game. You can't put on a ski toque and say you're a skier. You can't go to the linen closet, grab the pillowcase and just think you're getting free recess for a month."

2. Teen Halloween parties mean booze, so talk first

"If it's a teen party, in this day and age, alcohol will be at the party so you need to be proactive and say, 'Hey. Listen. I want you to know that our family values and our expectation that you will make good choices. You're still a minor. It's illegal at your age to drink, so if a bottle is being passed around, think now about what would be a good little comeback line to say no.'"

"Help them come up with that line, you know, 'I've got soccer practise tomorrow. There's no way. I'm not going to wreck my performance,' or 'My parents are really uptight about this. They're going to smell my breath. I'm not getting grounded.' Whatever is going to feel real or authentic to them."

"If things go off the rails, they need to know that they can pick up the phone and call you, and you will come pick them up. Not to get into a car with somebody's that been drinking."

3. Sexy costumes may not be so bad

"It's problematic in all the messages that it sends, but by the time my kids had gotten to that age I had already had many conversations with them about the sexualization of girls, of about the portrayal of women in media, in the characters they read in their books. We were talking about this stuff all the time."

"For them, it's the one night a year where you get to kind of suspend all these rules. In the spirit of that, knowing that I did feel that they were in healthy relationships, had a healthy understand of their body and were empowered, confident young women that were in leadership roles, I thought, you know what, I'm not going to use one of my few big, 'No. Over my dead body,' cards for that moment."

"If you're a parent where that's an abhorrent thought, you can say, 'You know what? I don't say no to every little thing but on this one, I have to tell you, I'm super uncomfortable.' And if you've got a good, healthy relationship with your teen and you're not saying, 'No, no, no,' over every little thing, they will honestly just say, 'This puts my parent in a really uncomfortable position … so I'm not going to damage the relationship.'"

4. If your kid is easily spooked, make a plan

"What we do with any child who has fears and anxieties is kind of like an exposure therapy. Just find the necessary tension of what they feel uncomfortable doing and help them face that challenge. That might be, depending on the age of your kid, walking around your neighbourhood in the daylight looking at which houses you might go knocking on the doors of in the evening and saying, 'Oh look that looks like a dead hand coming out of that pumpkin but look, come touch it, it's really just plastic. They're trying to spook you.'"

"Avoid the more rigged up houses … don't force them.  You don't need to say, 'Suck it up buttercup.' You need to work with them."

5. Have the candy battle before trick-or-treating

"No kid wants to hand over their pillowcase of candy that they've been drooling over all night and be given a book. That's not going to fly so talk about it up front. My policy with my kids was, 'You can acquire it at any rate you want – so if you bring in a big haul so be it.' And the night of Halloween I even let them indulge in whatever they wanted. But after that we go back to our family rules about eating sweets. When they were little it was one piece a week and when they were older it was one treat a day … Whatever it is, talk in advance."