Parents are spending big bucks on birthday bonanzas — but do the kids care?
Boho slumber party? Palm Springs pool party? Mad Hatter’s Tea Party? Fairy bread and pass the parcel are so yesterday when it comes to kids’ birthday parties, with one Melbourne venue charging $20,000 per event.
Lifestyle
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A quiet South Melbourne laneway is the epicentre of Melbourne’s booming party scene. From the street it’s a nondescript brick warehouse, but inside it’s a magical wonderland with elegant swagged curtains, gigantic chandeliers and dramatic, atmospheric lighting.
The Party Room for Kids is a spectacular venue ideal for a 21st or golden wedding anniversary. And yet each Saturday and Sunday, it’s filled with five to 10-year-olds celebrating birthdays.
Depending on the theme, there might be a giant blow-up pumpkin carriage with Cinderella and her handsome prince. Or perhaps 5m-tall T-Rex dinosaurs, Tarzan and Jane for a jungle party.
Pick the vampire/zombie theme and the walls turn blood-red and a skeleton holds centre stage on a giant throne. For the Snow Queen theme, there are snow cones, bud lighting and snowfall.
It’s a sign of the times. Backyard parties in the 1970s gave way to McParties in the 1980s and video nights in the 1990s.
Thirty years on, parents are throwing big birthday bashes complete with colour-coded dessert bars, balloon garlands, dress-ups and entertainers.
Whether it’s at a venue or at home, many parents these days don’t have a kids’ party, they have an event. They don’t have food, they have catering. And kids don’t play games, they have entertainment.
Popular party venues and activities include ten-pin bowling, Gold Class movies, trampolining and indoor rock climbing.
Kids invite their friends to bop ’til they drop at a disco, cook and decorate cupcakes, make their own pizzas or do a spot of glamping in the living room.
A few sausage rolls, a box of Cheezels and a game of pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey doesn’t cut it anymore.
The success of The Party Room for Kids — which hosts eight parties a weekend — reflects a growing trend for kids’ birthdays to become expensive extravaganzas.
The venue hire is $1000, but add a custom-made cake by the house chef, themed cupcakes, party food, party bags and catering for the adults, and the bill can climb to $2000 for a 90-minute bash.
If that sounds like a lot, think again.
Not far away in St Kilda, there’s a venue where parents spend 10 times that amount on kids’ parties.
The George Ballroom, which is mostly used for weddings and corporate events, also hosts a number of children’s events, including christenings, bat mitzvahs, bar mitzvahs and birthday parties.
“On Saturdays, there’s a minimum spend of $20,000,” event manager James Traill says.
This includes venue hire, furniture and all food and drinks. Decorations and entertainers are extra.
Who’s spending that kind of money on a kids’ party?
“Lots of different kinds of people,” Traill says.
“You can never pick them. A first birthday for a child is often the first birthday for the parents as well.”
The 2018 Real Insurance Family Values Report says Australian parents spend an average of $270 on their kids’ parties, which translates to a whopping $1 billion a year nationally. Parents say they spend about $185 on their own kids’ presents and $46 on their children’s friends’ presents.
Given that most kids attend eight parties a year, this adds up to a $1.4 billion birthday bonanza for the party and gift industry.
Janine Lynch, event manager at The Party Room for Kids, said it’s a reflection of our “crazy, busy world”. Her main customers are “busy working mums who love the idea of having it all done for them”.
“Parents welcome a one-stop shop,” she says.
“It saves them from having parties at home where you can spend a lot. We save them from having to ring the balloon company and the entertainment character company and the jumping castle.”
The Lenzo online party shop sets out the expectations for the modern kids’ party.
First, choose a theme: Boho slumber party? Palm Springs pool party? Mad Hatter’s Tea Party?
Then pick a venue. Images show large sun-filled rooms packed with giant balloon garlands, colour-matched furniture, on-trend table decorations and lavish platters of party food.
Then buy all the extras. This includes hiring accessories such as hot dog stands, cake plinths and doughnut walls.
None of it comes cheap. Hiring a princess chair in dusty pink velvet is $90, a pastel dessert cart is up to $1000 with food, and a mini ferris wheel starts at $340.
Lenzo founder Elleni Pearce says parties can cost upwards of $15,000-$25,000.
“There’s no limit to how far some people take it.”
But she points out that not all parents spend a lot, with some picking a “hero piece” and building a theme around it.
“It might be the cake or a backdrop to the dessert bar. They’re happy to spend big on one piece and compromise on the rest,” she says, adding that social media is having an impact.
“People don’t want to wear the same dress as someone else and parties are the same — everyone wants to be unique. They want that special photo moment.”
The Family Values Report shows 70 per cent of parents say social media and celebrities put pressure on them to throw “visually impressive parties they can share with others online”.
Instagram and Pinterest posts are packed with high-end kids’ parties in and around Melbourne. Recent events include a circus-themed party for a two-year-old in Williamstown, a pastel unicorn girl’s party in Sandringham and a jungle safari theme for a one-year-old in Clayton.
As is often the way, celebrities lead the party pack.
In 2014, Kim Kardashian threw a first birthday for her daughter North West. The event was called “Kidchella” which was a riff on the Coachella music festival.
The extravaganza included a ferris wheel, dress-ups and a tiered rainbow birthday cake.
The event attracted global interest, with Kardashian criticised for being “pathetic” and her choice of baby outfit “ugly”.
It’s a tightrope walk done by parents everywhere. Don’t do enough and you’ll let everyone down. Go overboard and people think you’re showing off. Put yourself out there and you open yourself up to criticism.
Local model and presenter Rebecca Judd felt the fury of the fun police earlier this year when the party she threw for her five-year-old daughter Billie was savaged on social media.
The LOL Doll-themed party, which featured cakes, balloons, decorations and party food, was criticised for being over the top.
One called it “utterly disgusting” and another dubbed it an “overindulgence for a five-year-old”.
Judd was forced to hit back. “Kmart accessories, homemade fairy bread and fruit skewers, a cake from the shop around the corner and party supplies from the discount party shop — hardly lavish,” she pointed out.
The Family Values Report also found about 40 per cent of parents judge other parents for being too extravagant with their kids’ parties. But only 13 per cent say they could be accused of being too extravagant themselves with their own children’s birthday celebrations.
Psychologists call this “illusory superiority”, where people think the criticisms they have of others don’t apply to them personally.
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But not everyone agrees that kids’ parties are all about social media moments.
Davina Beskin runs Madfun disco party venues in Wantirna South and Moorabbin. She maintains it’s not about the parents, it’s all about the kids.
“We ask the kids what they want to do. Elsewhere it’s all about the grown-ups but this is the opposite. Kids do musical statues, karaoke, learn dance routines and do the limbo, and get the DJ to play the songs they want,” Beskin says.
She says the majority of parties are “old-fashioned fun. If the kids are happy, then the parents are happy”.
Margot Pellicano, a stay-at-home mum from South Yarra, hosted her daughter Ruby’s fifth birthday party at The Party Room for Kids a few weeks ago. She hasn’t found other parents to be competitive.
“It’s got a lot to do with who your friends are,” Pellicano says.
She agrees parties are “all about the kids”.
“They walked in at Ruby’s party and went, ‘wow’ and that’s what you want,” Pellicano says. “Some of the kids said it was the best party they’d ever been to in their whole life. They wanted to go back the next week and have their own parties there. It was a very special, magical, unique party for Ruby.”
Pellicano says her own parties as a child were very different.
“We had parties at home and mum would make up games like pass the parcel and she’d do all the wrapping herself,” she says.
“Or we’d have ankle races with our legs
tied together. I couldn’t have imagined anything like Ruby’s party. They were poles apart.”
She said such venues are the “saviour” of parents of kids born in winter because “you can’t rely on Melbourne weather to be kind”.
Pellicano, who’s also mum to Leo, 3, and Aston, 1, says she had “done parties at play centres and at the zoo but Ruby wanted a unicorn theme so I jumped on Google to find something a bit magical”. However, Lynch has found a slight “competitive element” among some parents at times.
“They think ‘Oh, Ella had something incredible so I want to be able to give my child something incredible’. Ultimately, we want to spoil our kids and give them everything.
“People will find the money to spoil their kids,” Lynch says.
Beskin disagrees that parents are merely trying to compete. “We get so many lovely mums and when you get lovely mums you get lovely kids.”
She says the party experience is the same regardless of the money spent. “We have parents on every budget. Some pick the $336 package and want to pay it off in instalments. Other mums pick the $600 option and then order platters for the parents and lolly bags, but the experience is the same either way.”
Carrum’s Amanda Cormack, who owns In-Tents Slumber Parties, agrees most of the mums are “really lovely”. She has 30 charming wooden tented beds that she drops off for sleepover parties around Melbourne. Packages start at $240 for five tents, including fairy lights, throw cushions and breakfast tables.
It’s a far cry from Cormack’s own slumber parties as a kid where she “literally slept on the floor in a sleeping bag”.
“We don’t do that anymore,” she says.
Despite the increased expectations, she says most of the kids are well-mannered and appreciative.
Beskin says it’s best not to judge the parties people throw.
“Once in a while you find everyone is crying while they are singing Happy Birthday and you find out there’s a story. At one party everyone was in tears and I asked the mum if we’d done anything to upset the people in her party.
“She told me one of her children had passed away and this was the first party without that child but they didn’t want to ignore the birthday,” Beskin says.
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“Sadly, that has happened more than once and I think having the party is part of moving on and getting back to some sort of normality.
“I had another mum who went totally overboard, and she told me she’d had a large number of miscarriages and she felt her child was her little miracle.
“It sounds corny, but we really do try to bring a bit of magic and happiness into the kid’s and parent’s lives. It’s not just a party, it’s about making memories for someone.”
These days, party memories don’t always come cheap, but the best ones last a lifetime regardless of cost.