Why children are obsessed with candy

I was trying to remember something that happened when I was very young. I thought back and retrieved the memory of walking around with my grandmother in her neighbourhood and she was telling me about the thing I was trying to remember. Like most memories, this one contained some tiny details. My grandmother was still taller than me at the time. It was one of the first spring days that year when I didn't have to wear a jacket. I could see the water from the top of this one hill. And I was thinking about wintergreen lifesavers - either my grandmother had just bought me some, or I was hoping to convince her to buy me some.

Then I realized: I was thinking about lifesavers, like extensively! I was so fixated on the idea of getting lifesavers that it's coming out as an underlying emotion in the memory 20 years later! As adults, if we want lifesavers we just buy some without a second thought. But kids can't just go and buy lifesavers. They don't have money, and if they do have money they still need permission from a grownup to go to a store, and then the grownup is there to approve or veto their purchase. So that leaves my child-self there absolutely obsessed with convincing her grandmother to buy her lifesavers (Should I ask outright? Should I play coy?) and/or the fact that her grandmother has just bought her lifesavers (Should I eat them all now? Should I save some? What will my parents think?). It wasn't something over which I had any control and I was entirely at the mercy of the grownups buying lifesavers for me and permitting me to have lifesavers, so it became this idee fixe.

And my grownups had never actually been unreasonable about my having candy! Looking at it from an adult perspective, my grandmother would totally have bought them for me if I'd asked, and it might have made her a bit happy to buy me a treat that makes me happy. And my parents wouldn't have taken away a treat that my grandmother bought me, and might have even come up with the idea of testing the theory that they make sparks if you bite them. But because I couldn't just go get them myself, because it was logistically necessary to ask for and receive permission to have lifesavers, they became this Great Big Thing in my mind.

So maybe if all kids has $5 in their pocket and a corner store that they could walk to themselves, they'd stop obsessing with candy (after an initial burst of enthusiasm).