The rise of the birthday blowout

Can you guess which of the following birthday party stories are true?

(a) A child receives 70 gifts and is then allowed to open one present a day for the next 70 days.

(b) A three-year-old’s party is staffed by men in butler costumes serving juice boxes from silver trays.

(c) A four-year-old is serenaded by a Blues Brothers tribute band.

That’s right, it was a trick question—all of these examples are real tales of out-of-control kid parties, courtesy of fellow NYC-area parents. But you weren’t fooled, were you? Because, as someone whose children are regularly invited to such gatherings, you’re no longer surprised to see a preschooler’s birthday celebration transformed into a bacchanalia of conspicuous consumption. You’re used to logging onto UrbanBaby.com and seeing posts like “How much pizza do I order for parents at a birthday party if I expect 39 adults?” (Actual answer: “Three slices per person.”) Like me, you might even have been tempted to dip into the escalating excess yourself.

And who could blame us? The national advocacy group Birthdays Without Pressure (BWP) conducts surveys to measure the “community pressure rating” of major metropolitan areas, and predictably, New York ranks number one, with an average pressure score of 17 out of 20 (San Diego, the number-two-ranked city, doesn’t even come close). But before you pull the trigger on a megabash your accountant will never forget and your child will barely remember—stop! A Monster Birthday backlash has begun here, and across the country, and not a moment too soon. 

“Parents are trying to create a once-in-a-lifetime experience every year,” says BWP cofounder Todd Seabury. “And there’s a lot of competition; in any given neighborhood, each new party has to outdo the last. Naturally, people are going to reach a breaking point.”

I flirted with that danger zone myself. When our daughter turned four, my wife and I decided to host the party in our apartment. By all accounts the fiesta was a success, but her early-in-the-year birthday was followed by invitations to other children’s parties at more lavish and remote locations—requiring, in one case, a daylong excursion that took us across state lines. We stuck to our guns (or at least our budget) when she turned five, and held another at-home party. Since then, we’ve been pleasantly surprised by invitations to the apartments of several of her classmates, as well as some mellow local venues. Apparently we’re not the only ones with a desire to spend less time planning our daughter’s birthday party than we did planning our wedding. “We’ve heard from families who are turning the tide,” says Seabury. “Instead of keeping up with the Joneses, they’re saying ‘Screw the Joneses!’ ”

It’s not just the financial burden that has parents fed up; it’s all the rules. There’s an unspoken set of guidelines that governs the structure of the Monster Party; it can be quite draconian, requiring you to invite obscene numbers of people and demanding that you attend to grown-ups as assiduously as to their offspring. I don’t know exactly when this hyperobsessive code of etiquette became the societal norm, but any deviation—like, say, if you open gifts at the party—will result in the awkward stares and nervous twitters usually reserved for the off-color jokes of the drunken sales manager at an office party.

These party rules not only sap the fun from what should be a chaotically joyous occasion, say many of the parents I spoke to, but also necessitate much overspending. It is possible for sanity to reign at your child’s next birthday, but only if you stay alert and beware the dangers that lurk around every party-planning corner.