Do you think they’re fun? Necessary? Just another gift grab?
This is on my mind because I just received an invitation to a Reveal Party for one of my grandnieces. (Great nieces? Whatever you call the daughter of one of your nephews.)
The thing is… well, the whole situation is unfortunate, imho. The girl was just one year into getting her nursing degree and got knocked up (don’t they teach them anything??) by an unemployed boy she’d known for barely a couple of months. Who, we found out, is freshly released from prison (car theft.) She dropped out, of course, though rumor says she might have been tossed out due to grades in any case.
So, basically we have two young, stupidly acting people with no (legal) income, no real prospects, living in her parent’s ‘mother-in-law’ apartment about to take on the responsibility of raising a child, ghod help him/her.
Did this prevent the girl/her parents from throwing a massive wedding and reception they (the parents) probably couldn’t really afford? Of course not. She’d always DREAMED of her perfect wedding, you see, so why shouldn’t she have it? And she had a bridal shower catered at a fairly Ritzy restaurant, too. And then a baby shower just a couple months later. (I know about all this because I was at each of them <sigh>)
And now she’s having a Reveal Party.
Why??? How many parties does she think she’s owed in the course of about five months? Does she really think it matters to anyone outside of her, her husband, and maybe her parents whether the kid is a boy or girl? In advance, I mean? I’m sure all of us can bear the suspense for another two months.
Or I suppose my old fogeyness is showing. Maybe Reveal Parties are damn near required and the most wonderful thing ever. Maybe I’m just prejudiced because of the situation surrounding this particular one.
What I want to understand is how in this day and age the importance of gender, the imperative to lock in gender definitions for each individual and reinforce gender roles for children in society so heavily. It was locked in and enforced long ago when I was born, of course, but what’s up with the intensification in recent years as shown by gender reveal parties?
That’s my feeling. Tell me ahead of time, or don’t tell me. Just don’t make it some big production. A co-worker is having her gender reveal 1 week before her due date. Yep, 1 week. Everyone in the office knows, but her daughter doesn’t. The office pool is starting to place bets on if she’ll go into labor before, during or after the party.
This. It feels like moving backward. Decades ago, the sex of a child mattered a great deal, in determining what expectations would be placed upon them and what opportunities would be open to them. I sincerely hope gender is much more irrelevant these days.
And that doesn’t even address the possibility of any kind of gender fluidity or transgenderism, which I would certainly hope we’d accept as any individual grows up.
So yeah, I think gender reveal parties send the wrong message. Plus they do come across as attention-seeking gift grabs.
The whole thing is really weird. This is reality TVs fault: as a society, we are obsessed with watching people have reactions. So now proposals have to be elaborate, so we can all share in the woman’s reaction. Kids film themselves getting their college decisions and they go viral. We are obsessed with the moment of revelation, and we want it to be as public as possible.
It all seems like a lot of fucking pressure to me. Ultimately, it means your spontaneous reactions have to match the ideal, or you failed. And it also puts way way too much weight on initial reactions, as if those were more authentic. Instincts are not magic. There’s been plenty of wonderful parents who were horrified when they realized they were expecting; plenty of good marriages that started with one partner working through doubts.
Aye; I don’t give enough fucks about most people to need to help make every fucking thing that happens to them “special”. Yeah, yeah: it’s part of your life. Great; thanks for sharing. NEXT!
I’m sort of sympathetic to the desire to gather the tribe and throw a party. (although there seem to have been rather a lot recently for this branch of the family.) And hey, it’s an excuse to serve cake. But the whole focus on the gender of a kid who isn’t even born makes me uneasy. More because of the gender focus than the unborn thing – I’ve never known someone who truly regretted that her friends knew she was upset about the still birth.
Also, I have never been invited to a gender reveal party, but I thought they replaced the shower, I didn’t realize they were in addition to the shower. I mean, how many parties do you need for each kid?
I don’t have a stake in this since it’s unlikely that I’ll ever have a kid, but I think they’re silly and tacky and a bit sexist. (And yeah, it feels like society is going backwards in some ways, pushing way more gender-coded stuff on kids way earlier.)
You are so much kinder than me. I don’t think it’s about watching people’s reactions at all. I think it is about wanting attention. A gender reveal party is just another avenue to get showered with attention. As if a baby shower isn’t enough.
So yeah, I find these things to be incredibly stupid. Whenever I hear about someone throwing one of these, I inwardly hope that their baby comes out with the opposite genitalia.
StarvingButStrong, I think it is perfectly acceptable to sit this one out. Because there will inevitably be the baby shower and baby’s first birthday party. Then there will probably be another baby after one and the whole cycle will repeat. No one with any decency would expect all extended family members–especially old fogeys–to show up to these things.
Hate 'em. Hate showers. Hate teas. Hate weddings. Hate any gathering where there are more that 3 or 4 people.
But, if peeps wanna do it. Fine with me. I ain’t coming.
I endured my kids things like this but I was unhappy about it.
And in OP’s case a divorce party? (Yep, people do that too. Or rather, women do it.)
OTOH, I did love the Facebook post from a former co-worker who had gone through hell and back with her husband to get pregnant. Everything was pink and blue with question marks on it, and out in the yard was a large box, which, when opened, had pink balloons on one side and blue balloons on the other, and a huge heart-shaped balloon in the middle that said “TWINS.” They had known about the twins from the start but hadn’t told anyone about that either. The kids are about 2 1/2 now.
I think reveal parties are ridiculous.
Though it seems to me that the family situation described in the OP isn’t quite related to gender reveal parties in general.
They’re kind of silly , but if I were young and expecting, I’d invite everyone over for a gender reveal, except I’d know the gender in advance so when I cut the cake, it’d be…purple!
Yeah, these parties seem to be a combination of a cry for attention and an attempt to force or reinforce traditional gender roles on children. Nothing that I like in either one of those, plus they’re incorrectly conflating sex and gender.
Also the idea of ‘lets have a party so I can tell you what my baby’s genitals look like’ is pretty off-putting when you think about it.
I call it “the repinkification”. When I was little, I was taught that being a boy or a girl didn’t mean jackshit except for the purely-physical differences; parents who claimed that their little girl was “their princess” might get a dry “that doesn’t make you a king, you know. Maybe a stablehand.”
Now all kinds of objects are pinkified. Pink clothing, pink power tools, pink pink pink pink! Someone decided that “little boys can’t wear Dora backpacks to kindergarten!”; thankfully it seems to be less than 1/3 of the parents, but it still is a lot more than the parents who wouldn’t have let their little ones wear Snow White, Mogwli or Maya the Bee backpacks. If you’re a girl you MUST shower yourself in pink; if you’re a boy you’re not ALLOWED to get anywhere near the pink alley in the toy store.
