The email was apologetic in its tone, if apocalyptic in its content. The entertainer I’d booked for my daughter’s fifth birthday party was no longer available – she’d been invited to perform as an extra on Strictly Come Dancing, an opportunity too good to miss. I swallowed my surprise (aren’t these appearances negotiated months in advance?) but couldn’t quell the mounting panic that anyone who has struggled to source a children’s entertainer at short notice without remortgaging their house will recognise.
With no expert in charge, a kids’ party is simply a mass socially-sanctioned sugar-fuelled breakdown – and that’s just for the parents. Even with an expert’s help (I eventually found a princess impersonator prepared to corral 20 screaming youngsters into a Hokey Cokey for the price of a weekend break) it’s a train wreck from which nobody escapes unscathed.
So it was with interest that I considered the question posed by Carrie Johnson, wife of former prime minister Boris, following a Fireman Sam-themed party to celebrate the third birthday of their son Wilf this month. Alongside pictures of the family in fancy dress, Carrie posted on social media: ‘Is there anything more exhausting than a three-year-old’s birthday party?!’ My answer, as a mother of two children now aged 12 and ten, is an emphatic ‘yes’: their fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth, ninth and tenth birthday parties. Sorry, Carrie, but they get progressively more stressful with every passing year.
Sympathy from grandparents who marked our own milestones with a game of pass-the-parcel might be in short supply, but the burden on parents to make our kids’ parties a success feels more overwhelming than ever. Social media is blamed – in 2018 more than a fifth of parents surveyed claimed that capturing an Instagram-worthy shot added pressure for their child’s first birthday party to be tantrum-free – but I’d argue guilt is a bigger factor. Longer working hours and the inevitable rise of dual-income households means we’re so desperate to make amends for our absence that we’ll surrender our overdraft to a trampoline park on a city ring road faster than you can say ‘£300 for 20 portions of tepid chicken nuggets and a Covid infection, please’.
Research by Barclays in 2018 found that on average, parents will spend more than £4,800 on birthdays throughout the primary school years, with the typical party costing a little over £430. The bill for party bags – the collection of useless plastic tat young guests expect at the end – can be as much as £223 per bash. This is despite around a third of parents admitting they’re well aware that there are better things to spend their money on.
At nine, your child will enter the ‘activity party’ phase, which entails fewer guests but steeper bills, a risk of broken bones and fierce competition to book one of the handful of ice-skating rinks and adventure playgrounds within a one-hour radius
Entertainers might call the shots (the illusionist we hired for our son Felix’s fourth birthday turned up at 3 p.m. with a whiff of A-list entitlement and eau de beer), but brave a party without one at your peril. When she turned eight our daughter Rosie asked for ‘dancing’ to a Spotify playlist – a suggestion we wholly approved of until we considered the terrifying reality of 20 girls on a sugar high stuck in a tiny room together for two hours with nothing to do but bop to ‘Baby Shark’. At this point, with one week to go, my husband worked until midnight every evening compiling a computerised tween version of a pub quiz replete with accompanying print-outs, his day job suddenly seeming a doddle in comparison.
Who to invite and how to RSVP is as awkward for the parents as it is for the children. Leave someone out and risk a rift at pick-up. Fail to turn up (am I alone in finding an invitation at the bottom of a school bag six months after the event?) and your social pariah status is consolidated. In 2015, Derek and Tanya Walsh were threatened with legal action and issued with a £15.95 ‘no-show fee’ by the mother of a classmate of their five-year-old son Alex, after Alex didn’t show up to the classmate’s party at a dry ski slope centre in Plymouth. Tanya described the ‘invoice’ as ‘over the top’.
Buying presents is similarly fraught. I delegated this responsibility to my husband last year, only to discover he had been bulk-buying floating desk globes clearly described on the box as ‘a great promotion gift’ for our son’s friends’ tenth birthdays.
Trying to avoid acquiring a mass of identikit Monster Trucks, meanwhile, risks opprobrium, as illustrated in 2015 when TV personality Myleene Klass publicly criticised two mothers at her daughter Ava’s London school who asked for a ‘suggested’ £10 contribution towards ‘class birthday’ gifts of a Kindle and a desk. Klass tweeted her sarcastic reply – ‘For Ava’s birthday she has requested a real live unicorn. I will be collecting unicorn money via her book bag, in the playground or at www.getwhatyouregivenandendthismadness.com’ – and later pleaded with parents to ‘go back to basics’.
Whether that means baking a cake is debatable. The humiliation I felt comparing Rosie’s pristine shop-bought Barbie cake with the lovingly homemade creation by the mum of the child she shared her sixth birthday party with was matched only by the horror two years later of the fondant icing falling off the number eight I’d designed from scratch minutes before we had to transport it to the venue.
At nine, your child will enter the ‘activity party’ phase, which entails fewer guests but steeper bills, a risk of broken bones and fierce competition to book one of the handful of ice-skating rinks, go-karting venues and adventure playgrounds within a one-hour radius. By the time of Felix’s Go Ape party last year, most of his friends were as familiar with the high-wire attraction as their parents were with the wearisome WhatsApped disclaimers. Herding a handful of tweens to a venue 50 miles away in time for their allotted activity requires nerves of steel (and, in my case, a speeding ticket).
There’s rarely respite afterwards because this genre is typically followed by a post-party sleepover – meaning that as much as you might like to ‘lie down in a dark room’, as Carrie Johnson put it, you’ll be patrolling the corridors at 4 a.m. for cake vomit on the carpet.
All endlessly exhausting things come to an end, of course, and as her 12th birthday approached Rosie said perhaps she wouldn’t have a party at all this year. Did I count my blessings at a rite of passage running its course? Bizarrely, no. I insisted she’d regret her decision and began brainstorming ideas. Perhaps, for all the pain, a party is a sign we’re still needed. Either that or I’m desperate to get rid of those surplus plastic party bag frogs still lurking in the drawer.
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