Not even parties are safe from the woke brigade

When chocolate bunnies are being removed from shelves and primary schools ban a rite of passage for young children, you have to stop and ask what lead us to this point, writes Louise Roberts.

Banning a child from handing out invites in the playground to their own birthday party is a school diktat too far.

But also it illuminates one of the biggest mistakes we make as parents — believing that our kids earn their life lessons from us.

Really, they don’t. It’s their interactions with other children and how they negotiate those challenges, tears and snubs that authentically build their independence.

But of course modern parenting is now all about crushing childhood and stripping out all the joy that not only inspires our kids but which, we decided at some point, actually hurts them. How clever we are protecting our kids from failure when in fact we are handing them a blueprint for failure.

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So let’s think about what has stopped being fun in childhood.

Birthdays. Once the king of annual experiences, the day you child is born is now a political minefield because another child might get upset.

Towing the line while allowing kids to have fun has become a minefield for parents. Picture: iStock

Mosman Public School, it was reported this week, has forbidden kids from handing out physical party invites lest someone feels left out. A move, we’re told, to obliterate anything “emotionally distressing” or a safety risk.

Instead, in a move to Stalinise any reasonable parenting, mums and dads are tiptoeing around and emailing invites under the cloak of cyberspace while the kid in question practically combusts in the classroom because he or she is under orders to stay schtum.

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Getting a piece of glitter-coated gaudy paper, with a two-hour timeslot to go nuts and stuff yourself with sugar, was once akin to unwrapping Willy Wonka’s golden ticket. And handing them out? You were the boss and didn’t every kid know it, showering you with their awe and respect until it was someone else’s turn the next week.

Birthday cakes, of course, are also out of favour. Teachers don’t want to slice them into 30-odd pieces because it means handling a knife and somewhere that obviously became an issue for a fragile parent hyperventilating about sawn-off kids’ fingers.

When even handing out birthday party invitations has been banned you know something has gone wrong. Picture: iStock

Can’t we allow our children to play unshackled from fretting grown-ups? Don’t our kids deserve that? And isn’t being left off the invite list a great character-building lesson to learn young?

Listen up Arabella. If you are being mean to other kids, this is what happens. And if there’s no reason to blank you, well, that happens in the adult world too so don’t take it personally. Move on.

Celebrated US anthropologist Professor Peter Gray once wrote: “Children are biologically designed to pay attention to the other children in their lives, to try to fit in with them, to be able to do what they do, to know what they know.

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“Through most of human history, that’s how children became educated, and that’s still largely how children become educated today, despite our misguided attempts to stop it and turn the educating job over to adults.

“We have created a world in which children are almost always in the presence of a supervisor, who is ready to intervene, protect, and prevent them from practising courage, independence, and all the rest that children practise best with peers, away from adults.”

Gray despairs at the modern culture of childhood and I share his view that we’ve almost destroyed it.

Birthdays are supposed to be fun, not steeped in red tape. Picture: iStock

And so to another example. Monkey bars — also targeted by the fun police. Nannystate clipboarders lectured us recently about the lifetime damage these steel frames cause kids.

The view was that dinosaur playground fixtures should be banned because they hurt bodies and hurt feelings.

Fairy tales and cartoons — an Achilles heel for the perpetually offended searching endlessly for something to be upset about. This includes felt puppets like Ernie and Bert from Sesame Street with their alleged confused message about sexuality and Peter Rabbit with his food allergy bullying.

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Don’t be caught in public reading The Hungry Caterpillar out loud in case you are accused of promoting an eating disorder.

So much for learning limits and practising risk management.

In reality there must be joy and adventure for kids. Otherwise, goodbye growth. But you might not find it in the chocolate aisle this Easter, if a trend from the UK wings its way over here.

A box set of white, milk and dark chocolate ducklings was hastily repackaged because it upset customers for being labelled “fluffy”, “crispy” and “ugly”.

It’s natural to want to protect children, but we run the risk of protecting them too much. Picture: iStock

The “ugly” is surely a reference to The Ugly Duckling by Hans Christian Andersen, a song referencing a mocked “stubby and brown” duckling who evolves into an elegant white swan.

It was the dark chocolate one that was labelled on the box as “ugly” so the racism card was produced before the packaging was pulped and reissued.

Woke chocolate. It had to happen.

“We are sorry for any upset caused by the name of this product, it was absolutely not our intention to cause any offence,” said the supermarket in question, Waitrose.

“We removed the product from sale several weeks ago while we changed the labelling and our ducklings are now back on sale.”

Show me a kid who thinks dark chocolate is racist. Anyone?

Chipping away at childhood traditions and joy under the guise of protectionism is a disaster for society.

The very definition of childhood should be joy. Let our kids just be.

And hold aloft those party invites. After all, when your sons and daughters are navigating parenthood themselves, the birthday fun they had as a kid will be a memory they’ll cling to.

@whatlouthinks

Originally published as Not even parties are safe from the woke brigade