They have been re-introduced into the calendars since last year as the country has limped towards a new normal. Now it seems the real revival has arrived, bringing with it an eternal truth: If you want a parent to feel a rush of excitement, or a surge of stress, or a wave of anxiety, or maybe just exhaustion, say- los que” I’ve been invited to, or have to plan, a child’s birthday party.
“I love kids’ birthdays,” says Lois Montague, a mother of two young boys in Napa, California. “We invite everyone.”
“Even just talking about these super-organized, themed parties makes me anxious,” says Matthew Koehler, father of a 9-year-old daughter in DC. “My wife and I are introverts.”
“Oh, gift bags are where I feel pressure, definitely,” says Jessika Boles, a Nashville mom of two. “Some moms have custom cookies that they individually wrap with ‘so-and-so’s fourth birthday’ and a princess tiara, that kind of thing, and a bunch of toys and candy, and you can say, well, that probably cost 15 or $20 per child.”
After several periods of pandemic hiatus, the birthday party scene has restarted, and parents are figuring out exactly what that means. Gifts or no gifts? The whole class, or just a few friends? Where are we doing this and do we want to do it? As the weekends roll in, parents say celebrations often shift to opposite ends of the party-planning spectrum: either more bombastic than ever, as design fanatics reacquaint themselves with -use your creative muscles; or decidedly softer, as families adopt an informal atmosphere.
“I think everyone is so exhausted,” Koehler says. “They want to do something special for their child, but they also want it to be an opportunity to have their friends and not have it be such a stressful situation.” In his social circle, he says, this has meant abandoning pre-pandemic house parties in favor of gathering in common outdoor areas.
“People are using the public parks or the school yard after hours,” he says. “They don’t have to rent any place. It’s cheaper. They can invite whoever they want, and people bring food and drinks instead of gifts. It’s much lower.”
Others, however, are happy to resume the festivities. Montague, a doctor who is part of a Facebook group for “party planner” mothers who work in the medical field, says the stress and burden of the pandemic years increased her focus on her children’s birthdays. children The online group is “amazing in its hype,” he says. “I think covid has made the opportunity to come together and celebrate things much more valuable.”
Social media, of course, has increased the need to stage a perfect photo backdrop. But the desire to fall is not so much superficial as a necessary form of balance, at least in his community: “I know that among my medical colleagues, we cling to the non-medical aspects of our lives as a form of escape,” he says. .
In Nashville, Jessika Boles has seen her community of parents jump right back into the pre-pandemic birthday party pattern, meaning she and her two children have attended many larger group gatherings at their studios. gymnastics and dance studios and Chuck E. Cheese parks and trampolines.
There are things she doesn’t like much about this prepackaged party approach: the cost, for example (she spent $500 for her son’s last birthday on a trampoline park), and the impersonal, formulaic structure of it all folded. But, he adds, for families who can manage the price, there are also some advantages. “I’m a working mom. I’m a college professor. I have a second job in healthcare, and it’s a lot of mental energy to put into it: ‘Where do I find decorations? And where do I make the cake?’ So I appreciate that there is a one-stop shop,” he says.
In Montana, Susi Milligan has recently entered the world of throwing birthday parties for her 6-year-old son’s friends and classmates, and says she hasn’t felt a sense of competition or a uniform set of expectations about how a celebration should be. Some families invite only a few friends to their home; others “tend to have pool parties at local hotels, filling the pool with inflatables,” he says. One family they know “had a pizza and glow-in-the-dark party in the open space upstairs at a local bar,” he adds.
She finds variety rather liberating: “Everyone does what suits them. I don’t feel the pressure to do something big, just something that’s right for my son.” (For his son’s birthday, he says, that meant inviting some of his friends to a snowball fight.)
“I’m still broken sometimes,” says Milligan. “Do we say ‘no gifts’ on the invitation? Do we invite the whole class?” Her guiding principle, she says, is “trying to figure out where our child is. What are the things we want to teach him at this age, how is he going to feel celebrated, and how do we help him love the kids around him?”
Caroline Willson, an educator and mother of a 6-year-old daughter and 9-year-old son in Memphis, has noticed some big (and welcome) changes in the birthday party scene in recent months. Before the pandemic, she says, parties were bigger, with bouncy houses and princess performers and professional face painting and the feeling that parents had put in a lot of effort or paid a lot of money to outsource that effort.
But as parents adapted to covid safety measures during the pandemic, those gatherings were replaced by smaller, more intentional celebrations, and that seems to have stuck. “Next week, my daughter is going to a birthday party that’s just the birthday girl and two friends, and they’re going to do something special together,” she says, “and that’s it.”
He’s heard other parents echo their own relief at this change. “It definitely feels like people are happy to be able to reimagine how we do it,” he says, “that it doesn’t have to be this high-pressure. It can just be a few friends hanging out.”
Willson says she herself used to be someone who ordered all of her color-coordinated streamers and bunting from Etsy, who stayed up decorating cupcakes until 2 a.m. the night before the party (something her children never seemed to notice once). , add). Now she’s someone who puts a stack of pizzas on a picnic table in the park and watches her son and his friends scream with joy as they run around with Nerf guns.
“I used to feel that in order to be a good mother, you have to pull out all the stops,” she says. “And then not being able to do anything allowed me to figure out: Maybe there are some things that kids care about, and we can still do them. But as for the rest, who were we doing this for?”
