ENTROPY UPDATE: THE SCARIEST THING AT HALLOWEEN THESE DAYS ARE THE PARENTS

Chattanooga Pulse - The List – Healthy Halloween Trick-Or-Treating Written by Pulse Staff

1. The smaller, the better. Buy only "fun size" or better yet, "mini."
2. Select candy that offers sugar-free options.
3. Buy value packs of sugarless gum.
4. Buy the handy portion-control craze and hand out 100-calorie packs of snacks (look for fun Halloween designs).
5. Pretzels are always a favorite, especially when small bags are designed for Halloween.
6. Stock up on 100 percent fruit chews or fruit "leathers". Dried pineapple rings (unsweetened) are super sweet and chewy—very satisfying.
7. Avoid the candy corn—it stays in molars and causes dental havoc.
8. Learn to like dark chocolate. It's healthy and has less sugar.

Halloween is one of the favorite holidays for all children. The reason is simple: free candy!

But, as a responsible parent trying to help keep your kids from joining in the growing youth obesity epidemic, there are ways to keep trick-or-treating healthier. . . The other thing you can do (and really should do) is to go through the haul your little costumed kid collected on his or her rounds of the neighborhood or mall. Not just to check for safety reasons, but to clear out the really bad stuff. One excellent parenting tip is to have a stash of "good" candy on hand to trade out for the treats you take from the bag.

Lenore Skenazy, Huffington Post - Forget all the guys in Bernie Madoff masks and tutus. If you want to see something really scary on Halloween, come to my apartment around 9 p.m. I'm letting my kids eat unwrapped candy.

They can eat any homemade goodies they get, too, and that unholy of unholies: candy where the wrapper is slightly torn. And on the very off chance they get an apple, they can gnaw it to the core, so long as there's not a razor-sized, dripping gash on the side. . .

It's not that I'm cavalier about safety. I'm just a sucker -- so to speak -- for the facts. And the fact is: No child has been poisoned by a stranger's goodies on Halloween, ever, as far as we can determine. Joel Best, a sociology professor at the University of Delaware, studied November newspapers from 1958 to the present, scouring them for any accounts of kids felled by felonious candy. And he didn't find any. He did find one account of a boy poisoned by a Pixie Stix his father gave him. Dad did it for the insurance money and, Best says, he probably figured that so many kids are poisoned on Halloween, no one would notice one more. . .

It's not just the fact that churches and community centers are throwing parties so that kids don't go out on their own. It's not just the fact that Bobtown, Pennsylvania has gone so far as to "cancel" Halloween altogether -- for the sake of "safety." . . .

No, the truly spooky thing is that Halloween has become a riot of warnings that are way scarier than the holiday itself. The website Halloween-Safety.com recommends that if your child is carrying a fake butcher knife, make sure the tip is "smooth and flexible enough to not cause injury if fallen upon.". . .

In England last year a man was ordered by his landlord to take down his lawn decorations because the zombies were too "realistic."

Our fears are so overblown they'd be laughable if they didn't sound so much like the fears that are haunting us the rest of the year. Fears that have lead to parents to wait with their kids at the school bus stop, and keep them inside on sunny afternoons. Fears that make parents forbid their kids from skipping down the street to invite a friend out to play. That's the everyday version of Halloween fear: The fear that we cannot trust our children amongst our neighbors for one single second because, who knows, they might be pedophiles just waiting to pounce.

If you want to see what childhood is becoming, look how at what Halloween has already become: A parent-planned, climate-controlled, child-coddled, corporate-sponsored "event," where kids are considered too delicate to even survive the sight of a scary costume.

Skenazy is founder of freerangekids.com and author of "Free-Range Kids: Giving Our Children the Freedom We Had Without Going Nuts with Worry."