Kids' Birthday Parties Are Hell

I will be hearing no counter-arguments at this time

For the past two and a half months, my family has been averaging at least two — and sometimes more!! — kid birthday invites per weekend. And, I’ve got to say, it has absolutely crushed my soul and sapped my will to live. I hate kid birthday parties.

I’m not sure if this is an unpopular opinion, or just one that feels a little transgressive to say because it sort of sounds like you hate children’s happiness? Kids love parties so much! But my neurodivergent ass loathes nothing more than spending my precious weekends trapped in an overstimulating environment, surrounded by the layering of dozens of kids’ shrieking voices, terrified that my kid will do something that will make me want to go out for smokes and never come back, all while I try to make small talk with parents I’ve met a handful of times at school events and other birthday parties but retained next to zero personal details about.

I get that I’m not the target audience here. These parties aren’t for me. But I assume I’m not the only one having this terrible, terrible experience. I hope this scream into the void will make someone feel validated and give us both the strength we need to make it through next weekend’s THREE parties, one of which is at an ice skating rink and I have no idea if I’m going to be expected to skate or not and this is a living nightmare.

I know this is a little different than the usual musings on ancient literature, parenthood, and big feelings that I post in this space. These parties have broken me and left me a husk of a human. I’ll be back with more of my usual next week, but today I just needed to get this off my chest. You get it.

In my current geographical and class milieu, the two major genres of kid birthday party seem to be 1) at some kind of dedicated kid party/jungle gym space, and 2) outside at a park/playground. Both of these suck, but they suck differently.

My kids are definitely more excited for type 1 birthday parties, so that’s a mark in their favor. Unfortunately, that means the noise layering will be contained inside a building, competing with the sound of industrial fans, in a space that feels blanketed with a thin film of norovirus. The kids will climb and jump in ball pits and smush their faces against disgusting surfaces until they’re both hungry and exhausted, at which point a disaffected teenage employee will usher them into a side room and give them two thin slices of pizza and a Capri Sun. My kid will barely touch the pizza, complain about how hard it is to get the straw into the Capri Sun (word, kid), and then gorge themselves on cake. By the end they’re simultaneously so exhausted and loopy that getting them into the bath to hose off will be an exercise in misery.

Type 2 birthdays are better, in my opinion, because at least I’m getting some vitamin D while I’m miserable. Also, these parties sometimes have beer. But there’s never enough shade, and the less structured vibe means that the party often seems to flow right into an unscheduled playdate, and then I need to decide whether it’s more important to me to seem chill and flexible to the other parents (and prioritize my kids’ socialization, I guess) or to give my nervous system what it so desperately craves: a dark, quiet room in which I can dissociate.

It’s only gotten worse as the year has gone on, because now that it’s March I feel like I have no excuse for only being able to match two or three parents with their respective kids. This deep into the year, it feels too awkward to ask someone which kindergartener is theirs or what they do for a living. So my options are to either fake it, stick like glue to the one other parent I know and like, or pretend that I have something Very Important to do on my phone even though I’m a dirtbag creative and there is literally nothing in my work that is so time-sensitive that it has to be done at 12:30 pm on a Saturday.

And then there are birthday gifts. I don’t know if there’s some kind of secret code here that I haven’t cracked yet, but it feels like a complex puzzle I have to re-solve every single week. Is there some gift that is guaranteed to be successful with most five-year-olds, and should I just buy fifteen of them and wrap them in advance? My kids are absolutely abysmal at giving guidance on this, and trying to get information out of them about the birthday kid’s interests and taste is an exercise in misery. Today I asked my son what to get his friend with the ice-skating rink party, and he said, “I don’t know, a dragon?” Child, if I had access to a dragon, you would know! I would go full Medea on this situation! (The flying away in a dragon-chariot part, not the child-murdering part.)

This woman knows how to escape a bad scene, is all I’m saying

Obviously, most of the time my kids just tell me about stuff that they like/want, which then makes me wonder if I’ve failed at teaching them theory of mind, literally the #1 thing that can do to raise kids who aren’t assholes according to

Melinda Wenner Moyer

, the absolute expert on this subject. So my kids’ inability to think of good birthday gifts feels like a symptom of my larger failures as a parent, which is fun.

A few years back, when my older daughter was eight, I just decided to take her at her word and give every single kid in her class a crystal-growing kit even though I’m 99% sure she was just trying to tell me that she wanted 15 crystal-growing kits. I hope those parents don’t hate me now for all the toxic chemicals I introduced into their homes.

The only person who gets how I feel about birthday parties is Esmerelda from the TV show The Good Place, a one-scene character who made me feel seen in a way I never have before. You can see the whole glorious thing in gif format here. She’s not talking about kids’ parties specifically — one weird thing about this otherwise immaculate show is the total absence of small children as members of society and an ethical consideration — but her description matches my feelings about kids’ parties perfectly. She may not be Chidi’s soulmate, but she might be mine.

And so far this entire rant has only been about being a guest at parties. Don’t even get me STARTED on planning/hosting them, and the deeply gendered labor of it all, and how my kids use their parties as an excuse to get absolutely drunk on power and try to disinvite their siblings, and how no matter how much seltzer I provide, it’s never enough. That could be a whole second rant.

Fortunately, my oldest daughter is a bit of a hermit — not sure where she gets that from, it’s a mystery — and this year we’re doing a small family-oriented birthday gathering for her. Basically just dinner where we make her favorite foods and give her stuff (possibly leftover crystal-growing kits). This, I can do.

And best of all, the dark, quiet room in which I can dissociate will be RIGHT THERE. That’s the dream.