Throw your child a birthday bash for less cash
BY ELLEN REAGAN March 8, 2011 5:04PM
Palatine party planner Sue Kirchner says a party at home is a great way to save money. And forget expensive decorations. “Kids don’t care about decorations. All they want to know is, ‘What are we going to be doing, and when can we eat cake?” she says.
Updated: June 7, 2011 7:05PM
The United States’ deepest recession since the 1930s officially ended June 2009.
But even in recovery, the U.S. economy has lost more jobs than it has added. The national unemployment rate now stands at 9 percent, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Factor in the people whose hours have been cut to part-time, and those who have given up looking for work, and the national unemployed and underemployed rate rises to 18.9 percent.
Is it any wonder consumer confidence is shaky? People are worried about keeping their jobs, their homes, their health insurance and their 401(k)s.
Parents also worry about one more thing: keeping up with the Joneses in giving their children all the trappings of a happy childhood. And no trapping looms larger or causes parents more anxiety than the annual birthday bash.
Ask any parent, and you’ll hear stories about houses transformed into Candyland, backyards into carnivals with circus tents and clowns, and little girls into divas taking limos to the day spa. The economy may be a bear, but the pull to host bigger and better birthday parties gets more bullish every year.
“There’s pressure to throw a party on the same level as your children’s friends so you don’t stand out,” says Allan Woodrow, a Vernon Hills father of two young girls who each attend between 30 and 35 parties a year. “There’s this perception that if you don’t spend the money, you will fail your kids.”
Observations like Woodrow’s inspired William Doherty, a professor in the University of Minnesota’s department of Family Social Science, to create a website called Birthdays Without Pressure (www.birthdayswithoutpressure.org) three years ago. “It’s a cultural phenomenon,” he says. “We’re all feeling it.”
“Bracket creep” is the name Doherty gives to the annual ratcheting up of a community’s birthday party norms to a point where people feel the need to justify themselves if they can’t keep up.
“The insidiousness of it,” he says, “is that it doesn’t just affect the middle class.” He cites colleagues’ research showing that low-income families and single mothers feel the pressure to throw large-scale parties they can’t afford.
Sue Kirchner, a family-fun coach in Palatine who has a party-planning website called Chocolate Cake Club (www.chocolatecakeclub.com), sees signs that parents are starting to push back. She follows a variety of mom blogs to keep tabs on her consumer base, and says birthday parties are a major source of frustration. “There’s a growing sense that ‘enough is enough,’” she says.
This summer she put a new product on her website after a panicked New Yorker contacted her for advice. The mother’s 2-year-old had just attended her first friend’s birthday party, an over-the-top affair that the woman feared she would have to match. “I told her she only had to throw a party she was comfortable with,” Kirchner says.
As she helped the woman put together a reasonably priced, at-home party, Kirchner recognized an unfulfilled need in the marketplace. Her website now offers three pre-packaged kits filled with everything parents need to throw a themed, two-hour, at-home party for eight children aged 10 and under for less than $200, including invitations and thank-you notes, games, a craft that doubles as the party favor, and a planning guide that contains a minute-by-minute agenda, recipes, decorating ideas and extra activities.
In addition to the pirate, pizza and garden party kits she already sells, Kirchner is creating racecar, princess and slumber party kits.
While other companies sell “birthdays in a box,” Kirchner says those packages contain beautiful paper goods and decorations, which she claims are a waste of money.
“You have to ask yourself what the goal of the party is,” she says. “Is it for mom to demonstrate her hostess style, or for the kids to have fun? Kids don’t care about decorations. All they want to know is, ‘What are we going to be doing, and when can we eat cake?’”
Throwing the party at home and limiting the number of guests is the surest way to save money, says Kirchner. According to Elizabeth Pleck, a family-life historian at the University of Illinois, the magic number of guests used to be the birthday child’s age plus one.
That guideline came out of the pioneering work of developmental psychologist Arnold Gesell at Yale’s Child Study Center more than 60 years ago. “Today,” Pleck says, “people seem to be getting the arithmetic wrong.”
She says big birthday parties began in Victorian England, where they were formal affairs designed to showcase a family’s wealth and teach children social etiquette. Such occasions, however, were only for the well heeled. Poor children’s birthdays weren’t even acknowledged, much less celebrated. And so it was for most kids in the United States until well into the 20th century.
As we enter the second decade of the 21st century, Doherty says he spends a lot of time convincing stressed-out parents that limiting birthday excess will not result in a Charles Dickens childhood for their kids.
“The purpose of birthday parties today is to celebrate the specialness of each child,” he says. “Extravagant parties don’t accomplish that any better than small gatherings.”
Jenny Meyerhoff, a Riverwoods mom of three, says that although her family has always held to the invite-the-whole-class philosophy that results in big parties, the numbers start tapering down in third grade, when single-gender parties become the norm. And even bigger parties needn’t break the bank if you invest in a little research.
When her daughter Emma turned 10, Meyerhoff threw an “Emmerican Idol” party for 18 girls for less than $100. It began with a Google search that uncovered karaoke software for only $25. Meyerhoff and her daughter spent another $10 on ink and postage when they used their the Print Shop software to replicate the American Idol logo for the invitations.
They turned their basement into a performance stage by outfitting the computer with speakers and a microphone and hanging a silver curtain they’d found in a party store.
After the guests raided the playroom dress-up bin to create their own costumes, Meyerhoff photographed each of them singing in front of the glittery backdrop and downloaded the pictures to Walgreens. Her husband picked them up while the girls were decorating Lucite frames that would, by party’s end, contain each guest’s moment in the spotlight. No need to stuff goody bags with cheap toys and candy when the partygoers create their own keepsake.
A children’s book author and former kindergarten teacher, Meyerhoff might be better suited to party planning than most parents.
“It’s a really fun six-week period to brainstorm with my kids,” she says. “If it was stressful and unpleasant, I wouldn’t do it.”
For those who find the process more intimidating, she recommends www.birthdaypartyideas.com, a website where parents post descriptions of parties they’ve thrown. “We go there for inspiration and then personalize it,” she says, adding that her children have never asked to outsource anything extravagant. “I think it’s because they’re coming from a place where planning their own party is more fun.”
Doherty claims it is our competitive, consumer culture that has colonized the term “birthday party” to mean a big, outsourced production.
“But to be a good parent in any era,” he claims, “you have to be somewhat counter-cultural.”
The slow-to-recover economy, he says, may be the excuse some parents need to step off the big-party merry-go-round.
Ellen Reagan is a local free-lance writer.
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