I’ve always been kind of leery of the argument that sugar makes kids hyperactive. Maybe it’s just the word itself: hyperactive. As if there’s one level of activity that is acceptable, and all other levels are either above or below that. (Speaking of below, why don’t we have a word for underactive kids—something like hypoactive? We could even pronounce it hippoactive, to better describe what the kids are going to look like after they spend an entire summer parked on the couch.) But back to the word we already have. Back to hyperactive.
Someone asked me once, watching Clyde vibrate from one part of our house to another, if I thought he had ADD. I looked at him, moving so fast he was almost a blur, and then I looked at his sister, Clementine, who had been sitting in the same spot reading a book for the previous two hours, and I said, “ADD? No, I think he just has a bad case of B-O-Y.” (Not that his sister was being hypoactive, mind you. She was just conserving her energy so that the next time Clyde’s peregrinations sent him within her sphere she would be able to reach out and smack him upside the head.)
I feel the same way about people who assume a link between out-of-control kids and sugar. When I see kids spinning in place at a birthday party or county fair, I don’t immediately assume that it was the fruit punch or the cotton candy that put them in that state. Instead, I think that maybe that’s just what they’re like—or at least what they’re like when they’re at a birthday party or fair. In other words, maybe it wasn’t the cake and ice cream that made them bounce off of the walls, but the fact that Spiderman showed up at the party—with a pony. And maybe it wasn’t the Sno-Cones and churros that caused them to act like they had been fast-forwarded at the fair, but rather the fourteenth trip around the Tilt-a-Whirl that did it.
That has always been my theory, at least. And it’s a good theory. A sound theory. One that I always believed would hold up under the most rigorous scientific scrutiny. Which is why, recently, when I was given the opportunity to put it to the test, I did. In other words, I let Clyde keep the entire bag of fundips he came home with the other day—all twenty-eight of them—all in the interest of scientific inquiry. (For those of you not up on all your candies, a fundip is a packet of sugar you eat with a candy stick. In other words, sugar dipped in sugar.)
I’ll admit I had some misgivings: looking askance at Clyde’s bag full of sugar and dye, suddenly I knew how Columbus must’ve felt sailing towards the end of the known world. It’s one thing to have a theory; quite another to test it. And yet, as a true believer in the scientific method, test it I did, that very evening at Movies on the Square. And then, vindication: as I watched Clyde vibrate from one end of Heritage Square to the other with a pack of his equally-hyper friends, I thought to myself, “Well, at least he’s no crazier than any of those other kids—the ones with responsible parents—I mean the control group.” And I kept on thinking that, all through the movie and halfway home, when, curious, I asked Clyde exactly how many fundips he had consumed that evening.
“I dunno,” he said. “I decided to share the bag with everyone else.” And then he shot off on his bike at something approaching the speed of light. And I was able to test out yet another one of my pet theories: the less his friends’ parents know, the better—at least for me.