The community standard is only the community standard because everyone in the community participates in it. She endorses the inviting of 25 kids by inviting 25 kids.
If it were really about teaching the child values, she would have talked to the kid about whether he needed more toys and how he already has a bunch of toys and what the resolution should be. If the kid is still not following, then suggest donating/disposing of old toys, not getting new toys, inviting fewer friends, book swap, etc. If the kid makes the choice, it is his values influenced by Mom, not Mom imposing her values on him.
FWIW, my school organized a book swap at one point. You brought X books and put them in the gym in the morning, you took X books from the gym in the afternoon. There must have been some extra source of books, though, but I didn’t care as a kid. I thought it was cool, but it wasn’t my birthday party. I never had a birthday party, some of my friends did and some didn’t. I grew up OK.
It seems that parents these days have all these ideas about what is good and appropriate for kids and many of the kids I know are confused about the seemingly random rules. Also, there is no moderation. Mom and Dad outlaw WalMart, action figures, trans fat, and the WB Channel. Kid never has a chance of understanding that Mom and Dad are trying to teach corporate responsibility, nonviolence, healthy eating, and age appropriate television.
One last point…is Mom sure that Eli picked up the whiney brat routine from TV, or maybe one of the 24 spoiled brats at his birthday party?
I’m with the age+1 theory. 25 kids are too many for a kid to enjoy at a short party. The Mom might have to have the kid turn down invitations from classmates he is not particularly friendly with to be fair.
While it is inappropriate to mention dollar amounts on an invitation, the mom (or dad) could call up the other parents and say they wanted to keep things reasonable. But let the real friends pick out presents the kid will like. I rather suspect this kid will hate books as presents. I love books, and I love getting them, but I wouldn’t like them as the only thing.
Course I’m speaking as someone who had about 25 at my wedding, and liked it just fine.
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Re The OP
It’s not what mom is trying to teach, but her methods. You want cheap party favors, entertained kids, and subversion of consumer culture? Gimme some cardboard tubing, masking tape, popsicle sticks, chop sticks, rubberbands, and a bunch of those free AOL CDs and each child shall produce their own subtly-instructive wind up toy at a cost of roughly nothing and available in no store anywhere.
25 kids, all with a gift? I never got 25 presents in one day as a kid—counting the books I specifically asked for—and I don’t think I even know 25 people now.
And the arrangements for that book swap-party sounded like planning the freakin’ Camp David accords. Why the Hell is planning a kid’s sixth birthday party that complicated?
And he’s a little kid. Kids play with toys. It’s been like that since the friggin copper age. I’m not saying you should get him a hundred toys for his birthday, I’m not saying you should only ever get him toys, and if his room already looks like F.A.O. Schwartz it’s another problem entirely, but getting him a damn G.I. Joe or two for his birthday isn’t going to warp him or turn him into a robber baron. (Or get him a wooden hippie doll hand-carved by hippies. It’ll cost $30 and give you splinters, but at least it’ll be ideologically pure.)
Why all this guilt about having stuff? The amount of stuff kids in well off families get as presents is mind boggling. It is often not so much a case of “I don’t want you to have presents becasue we must live a scarce lifestyle.” but more a case of “Great Ogg! Where the hell am I going to put another 25 Bratz dolls! We already have 2 suitcases full of them!”
(A suitcase full of Bratz dolls looks like some bizzare horror movie where the killer attacks a nightclub full of sluts and hacks off their feet. It is truly a scary sight.)
And the key is “TV is not bad” but excessive TV IS bad. Candy is not bad. But excessive candy IS bad. Our society pushes these things so heavily at our kids that even restricting kids back to reasonable amounts is seen by some as trying to turn them Amish.
Let’s also not forget we’re talking about a young kid. If she wants to sit down with her 18 year old daughter and explain why she’s not getting a $1000 prom, that is fine. But, trying these types of techniques with a child? I believe this is just wrong. They don’t have much life experience.
Shirley Ujest, while that may sound practical, it’s probably Miss Manners’s worst nightmare.
You can “spoil” your kid, and have him or her have lots of toys, but still teach them values. My parents used to go all out for Christmas, or so it seemed when I was little. But they still managed to avoid raising two greedy little brats.
Wow, I can’t believe so many people believer there is something so special and pure abut 20th century suburban American childrearing that it’s actually immoral to deviate from it. You guys are going to have a field day when I raise my kids. I’ve already decided that when they learn that they want designer clothes, I’m buying them a six pack of Hanes and a Sharpie and telling them they can have all the Calvin Klein shirts they can make.
Kids may not be ready for complicated social commentary, but they can form habits. When I was growing up, my mother consciously worked to read as much as she could. I grew up thinking that “reading all the time” was normal, and become an avid reader- certainly not the values of the poor undereducated community that I grew up in. Everyone I know that was restricted in their TV viewing will talk for hours about how deprived they were. But none of them are habitual TV watchers.
Kids are learning lessons every day from the culture around them- and not all of it’s good.A lot of it is thought up by marketing firms. I don’t want my kid to learn that the only food “kids” eat is chicken nuggets, hamburgers and pizza. Î don’t want my kid learning that soda is a normal accompaniment to all meals. I don’t want my kid to learn that housekeepers do the cleaning. I don’t want my kid to learn that driving for two-block trips is reasonable. I don’t want my kids to learn that the value of holidays is “stuff”, not time spent with loved ones. On a practical matter, I don’t want the constant fights about cleaning, not getting what you want all the time, etc. that I had growing up as a spoiled child with too much stuff.
And the solution isn’t always rebellion producing restrictions. My kids will be able to drink soda, but I’m not going to buy it from the store. My kids can watch TV, but I’m not going to have one in my house. By the timethey are old enough to want these things, they will be old enough to learn to earn money to buy them for themselves.
Ummm, not at five. At five, you really can’t expect a child to have a developed set of values. Mom does need to impose her values on the kid. Mine are six and seven, and even if I manage to get their attention long enough to have this conversation, the end result is “I don’t get what is wrong with more toys” (or more candy, more tv, more whatever instant gratification they desire). It isn’t that they are spoiled brats, its that they really don’t conceptualize long term, and have a hard time with the abstract “other.” (My son is getting close).
I do agree with the “community standard” problem. Seems like the breaks need to be put on in the community. She can participate, work for change, or not participate. We chose not to participate in these kinds of birthdays - we toss invitations from kids our kids aren’t close to (and make sure they have something just as fun as a birthday party to do).
:dubious: My birthday’s in February and my brother’s is in January. We never had “fun zoo/swim/outing” parties and we were perfectly happy. In fact, we didn’t have more than a couple of birthday parties in our whole childhoods. We usually got just one present (we preferred books) and a cake with dinner and long letters from our grandparents. Period. We weren’t in the least traumatised or even depressed about it.
And this was in OHIO!
How foolish we were not to realise the depths of our misery.
You and even sven are missing the point a little. I don’t approve of a mother making a big show of her “values”, particularly when she’s not really living them herself - living as she clearly does in a well-off upper-middle-class community and refusing to have a small birthday party because she might be “talked about”. It’s one thing to actually be poor and live that way; it’s something else to decide to put on a big display of it by deliberately denying something to your child.
I don’t think my comments addressed any of the issues you are talking about. I was just reacting to the “poor me” January-birthday survivors.
For the record, I sympathise with the author’s sentiments, but agree that her solution was all wrong.
In fact, from my point of view, her whole reasoning process from goal to solution is goofy, including this part, which no one has mentioned yet, I think:
Balderdash! No matter what age you are, you don’t get to demand that a party that your parents are organising follow certain parameters. Six years old is way too young to be given this level of influence.
I am another of those who thinks the right solution is to invite fewer than 25 children. Her solution is complex and tacky; its one advantage is that it doesn’t require her to sacrifice anything, so it’s hard to come up with flattering motives for her behavior.
I’d say that you are well within Good Parent ™ rules to say what you as a parent will not accept. But it is also perfectly reasonable to allow the 6 year old to make suggestions as to what form the party or lack thereof takes. Nothing more of a pain in the butt as a parent than when you lay down the law “We will have the party we have always had! I don’t want to hear any arguments!” and then the child comes up with a perfectly reasonable alternative. You are left to arbitrarily stick to your guns in the face of evidence that there is a better way, or change your mind and look like you are giving in.
And yes, 6 year olds do often come up with reasonable alternatives in cases liek this when the acceptable parameters are laid out. They may not understand WHY they can’t have 25 kids and all the presents (although my 6 year old did) but they can work with the rules you lay down.
Well, yes and no. I mean, the party’s for him, and at least I can understand why he’s upset. I’m a bit puzzled, actually, by all the people who’ve been calling him a brat. A six-year-old is way too young to understand the social issues involved here, and they don’t necessarily have the wherewithal to contain their emotions at that age.
Heck, I know a classful of three- and four-year-olds who think that’s just dandy.
I know there’s a lot of pressure for upper-middle-class parents to outdo each other in the birthday-party department. If the mother is so stuck on having “values”, she needs to put her money where her mouth is (so to speak), invite those kids her son’s closest to and have a freakin’ birthday party with presents and goody bags and stuff.
That said, I think the root of the 25-kid party is the notion that all the child’s classmates/scout troop/sports teammates/whoevers need to be invited lest someone feel left out. While that’s a fine sentiment in theory, it’s not workable in real life. I don’t think it’s fair to parents to expect them to host all these kids (and their parents); it’s expensive and it’s a lot of kids to entertain. And I don’t think it’s fair to the kids to expect them to socialize with kids they don’t really know or don’t like; also, expecting a six-year-old to keep his guests entertained is a lot to expect.
If it were me (and it will be soon), I’d cap the attendance to six of the child’s closest friends (and their parents) and screw the presents.
In other words, the mother can stuff her “values” where the sun don’t shine.
