Two of my children went to friends’ birthday parties last weekend. My 6-year-old daughter joined a friend at a trampoline park, while my 8-year-old son headed off to Dart Warz (an establishment catering to the irrepressible urge for tweens and teens, mostly boys, to plunk one another with Terminator-ready Nerf blasters almost as big as they are).
And the weekend before, my son attended a party at Battlefield Colorado, a laser tag company in a sprawling warehouse complete with cover made up of old military equipment and very realistic-looking guns. (If you wanted to snag an AK-47 replica, that was $10 extra; my son said that the owners said they wanted the experience to be like a level of one of the Call of Duty video games.)
Last November, I wrote a blog post called “Exposing the Cartoon Consumerism Industrial Complex.” But it seems to me there’s more than one such complex at work in our lives. If you have elementary school-aged kids, you’ve probably experienced something similar. I’ve come to call it the Birthday Party Industrial Complex: These parties seem like they’re growing more extravagant, and more expensive, by the month. In fact, every time my kids come home from one these parties, they have even more ideas about what they might do for their next birthday. After all, you can’t start planning too soon.
So far we’ve resisted, preferring relatively more modest at-home parties.
But even at home, the stakes of the birthday game have changed. It’s more than just cake, ice cream and games. There’s usually a theme, and retail outlets like Party City make it possible to spend almost as much on an at-home celebration as heading out to one of the more exotic alternatives I mentioned above. Not only can you trick your house out for a Harry Potter or Star Wars or Marvel superheroes or Dora the Explorer or Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles party, there’s also the de rigueur expectation that you’ll provide your guests with a “goody bag” to take home.
Like I said, the Birthday Party Industrial Complex. You will be assimilated. Resistance is futile. Right?
More than ever before, our kids are aware of the options out there. They’re aware of what their friends did for their parties. They want to do something equally awesome.
And just like that, peer pressure becomes parental pressure.
As a parent, I fully understand the temptation here. It’s two-fold. First, there’s the desire to make my kid momentarily happy. And, if we’re talking about doing one of these über-cool birthday party destinations, there’s also appeal of just showing up and not having to do very much. After all, birthday parties are a big part of what makes many of these businesses work. They know that stressed-out, guilt-laden and kid-pressured parents will pony up a few hundred dollars for a no-hassles party.
In her recent Slate article “Spoiler Alert,” Helaine Olen chronicles some of the factors that have influenced the upward consumer spiral for kids’ birthday parties, a trend Cornell University economics professor Robert H. Frank dubs an “expenditure cascade.” Olen observes, “The past decade has seen a major increase among the middle and upper-middle classes in the U.S. and Great Britain in what good parents are expected to do—not to mention provide—for their children.” One survey in Great Britain found the average party costs parents $289, Olen says. Meanwhile, gigmasters.com, a site that helps parents find vendors for their kids soirees, reports that 70% of families were spending more than $300 for birthday parties as of 2013.
Olen summarizes the very trend that we’ve experienced firsthand: “People spend. Then other people spend more. So more people spend even more. That’s how an expenditure cascade works. As our economic winners spend ever-larger amounts of money on their children, the standards increase for everyone, even those falling behind. No one wants to be seen as a cheapskate on his or her child’s special day, after all.”
It’s always a countercultural choice to opt out of prevailing cultural trends, whatever they may be. The pressure to conform, to consume, to be part of the in-group is always present—whether we’re talking about birthday parties for our kids or the more expensive expressions of keeping up with the Joneses that come along as we get older.
With our own kids, my wife and I are striving to emphasize relationship over consumption. Up until now, that’s meant choosing to stay at home and trying to carve out a birthday experience that’s focused at least as much on our children’s relationships with their friends as it is the stuff they everyone’s so interested in getting.
We’re not perfect at all this, mind you. And my point here is not that having a party at home somehow makes us better parents. It doesn’t.
My point here is this: We live in a cultural that shapes and molds the expectations our children have about what’s normal and what’s to be expected in life. As parents, it’s our job to understand and interact with the ideas and values that are shaping our kids … even when it’s something as seemingly innocuous as what happens at birthday parties, c. 2015.
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