Lessons from a Birthday Party

Recently, I attended the birthday party of the daughter of a friend of mine. It was the child’s first birthday, and the party was held at a fancy café in town.  

When I arrived at the venue, a sizable number of invitees were already present, mostly adults (presumably, friends, colleagues or relatives of my friend and his spouse). The place had been specially done up for the occasion. There were games to be played (organized perhaps by the café folks themselves) and other such ‘fun’ things. Uniformed staff wound their way around bearing soft drinks and short eats, a prelude to the dinner that was to follow. I chatted a bit with some of the guests, had a bit to eat and then a while later, left.  

From this brief description, you can gauge that the party was a rather elaborate and expensive event. I may not be incorrect if I estimate that the amount spent for the occasion—the birthday party of a year-old girl that lasted just a few hours—might easily have exceeded my income entire month and what many people in the part of the world where I live earn in perhaps an entire year. This one fact raises numerous issues worth reflecting on:

a.     Since the child whose birthday was being commemorated was likely just too young to understand what was going on, did having such a lavish party for her make any sense at all from her point of view?

b.     What values was this infant being (perhaps inadvertently) socialized into regarding as normal through this costly party held to celebrate her first birthday? What expectations and, also, what sort of lifestyle, was she being subtly (and perhaps unconsciously) groomed into accepting as normative by her parents even at such a young age?

c.      While some people might want to commemorate occasions that they consider special, like their child’s birthday, and have what they regard as a good time, surely this can be done on a far lower budget than what hosting it at a fancy café would entail. Fun doesn’t need to be expensive, as it certainly seemed to have been in the case of this particular birthday party. 

d.     In earlier times, in many traditional cultures, relatively few families (almost only Westernized elites) celebrated the birthdays of their children with a party, and those that did, almost always held the party in their own home. How might the now increasingly common practice of hosting a child’s birthday party at a fancy restaurant feed into and legitimize consumerism, the capitalist profit-seeking logic, economic inequalities and social hierarchies? How does the ‘outsourcing’ of something so simple as organizing a child’s birthday party to an expensive restaurant reflect and promote the growing tendency towards the corporatization of greater aspects of our life?  

e.     In earlier, parents who did celebrate their children’s birthday with a party at home generally arranged the entertainment and prepared much of the food themselves or with the assistance of domestic help.  What might the growing trend of holding birthday parties at expensive restaurants, with the entertainment and food being taken care of by restaurant staff, mean for roles of parents, parental involvement in children’s lives, child-parent relations and bonding between members of the family? What might this practice also mean for the home itself as a space and the way a child relates to it?

f.       Can one think of other, more truly meaningful ways of commemorating what some might regard as special occasions like a birthday—for instance, by hosting a get-together at a home for the elderly, or an orphanage or an animal rescue centre? Imagine the precious learning experiences in terms of exposure and awareness of, and sensitivity towards, those less privileged that a child (and others present on the occasion) might gain if their birthday party were held in such a space as compared to what they likely would if it were held in an upscale restaurant!

If I could have shared the reflections with my friend that my brief participation in the party that he had hosted for his child’s first birthday engendered, I might have done so, but of course I couldn’t—he could, I felt, easily take it amiss. Perhaps the best I can do, then, is to highlight them in and through this write-up, so that even if my friend doesn’t get to know them, some others might!