Mum Makes Parents Pay For Their Kid’s At Her Child’s Birthday Parties And They’ve Had Enough!

Kid’s birthday parties these days seem to be getting more and more extravagant. I remember when we were young, our birthdays were celebrated at home with good old ‘pass the parcel’ and ‘musical chairs.’ There were no kid’s entertainers, unless you count crazy uncle Pete, and we all feasted on mini party pies and sausage rolls. That was it. Nothing fancy, but let me tell you, we all had a great time!

These days, kid’s parties have to have some kind of Superhero or Princess character show up to entertain the guests. There’s usually a dessert bar and balloons that have been expertly blown up and arranged around the birthday table. Which incidentally holds the centrepiece of the whole party- the birthday cake. A cake which is usually themed and costs more than your own wedding cake!

So in a nutshell, birthday parties are expensive! But it’s an expense most of us are happy to deal with and have come to expect year in year out. Some parents however are outsourcing the cost of these events. They’re getting the parents of the kid’s invited to pay a ‘cover fee’ to attend the party. Yep! You heard that right! (Why didn’t we think of that?!)

In an advice column on the Boston Globe fed up parents have called out a mum who insists they pay a so called ‘cover fee’ for their children at her kid’s birthday parties. YES! She ‘charges’ people to attend her daughter’s birthday party every year.

Here’s what the poster wrote: I have a close friend who I adore. She is lovely and kind and a truly wonderful person. But every year, she charges people to come to her daughter’s birthday party. If it is at a venue, the e-mail will say something along the lines of “please bring $20 to cover the cost of your child.” If it is at her home, there will be an envelope or basket asking for “donations.” They’re not poor. People talk about her behind her back. Should I say something?

As you can expect, people had opinions! Lots of them! Some defended the mother saying perhaps she couldn’t afford a party for her daughter but the majority didn’t. In fact the consensus was ‘if you cant afford to throw an extravagant party then just do something simple!’ Kids are happy with a play in the park and a Coles mud cake. They don’t care! It’s the parents who try to outdo each other. And why should the parents of the other kids have to fork out to fund parties that seem to get more extravagant each year. That’s hardly fair!

Advice Columnist Robin Abrahams had a similar response saying, “Yes, oh yes. Don’t tell her people are talking behind her back or say “we all feel that way” — that kind of thing only makes people paranoid. But yes, speak up before her poor daughter has to, since sooner or later the girl will realize what her mother is up to and be humiliated.

Keep your beliefs about her finances to yourself, though. Unless you’re her accountant, you don’t really know how she’s doing financially, and anyway plenty of people have bizarre neuroses about money that make their objective circumstances irrelevant. Your friend could well be in that group.”

What do you think? Is it fair to make parents pay for their child to attend a birthday party?

Images: Pixabay