‘I took my toddler to our community Easter hunt and older kids snatched eggs from him’

“He looked up at me so confused and said, ‘Egg?’... There were 800 hundred eggs and he only got 11 in the end,” the devastated mum reveals.

Pilar Grace

3 min read

March 31, 2024 - 11:50AM

Parenting

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Early Easter Sunday morning, my three boys were out on a lovely grassy spot near the water with 20 other kids.

If you looked around and squinted a bit, you could see the foil wrappers of Easter eggs, nestled under bushes and next to tree trunks.

This was our school community Easter egg hunt, and the kids were champing at the bit to get started.

There were kids aged four to 12, and considering the strong call of chocolate, the kids were pretty civilised, with older kids leading the little ones around and helping them find eggs.

Maybe our event was nice because everyone knew each other, but this kind of civilised community event certainly isn’t the experience of all families.

Ceris, a US mum, thought her two-year-old son was old enough to go to their community Easter egg hunt this year.

She thought he was robust enough to stand a chance a with the older kids, and even if he wasn’t, she thought the big kids would look after him and make sure the little boy got a fair share.

The mum-of-one was dead wrong.

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Ceris thought the small-scale community Easter egg hunt would be the perfect first experience for her toddler. Photo: iStock

Older kids steal Easter chocolates from two-year-old

“There were 12 to 15 kids, aged between two and 12,” she explained in a Reddit post.

“I thought that was a good size to let my son have some interaction with others.

“We were asked to bring a basket and six eggs, and the church donated some eggs.

“There were over EIGHT HUNDRED EGGS thrown in the yard. Plenty for a little dude to grab while the bigger kids get the harder-to-get eggs, right?”

Ceris said the organisers made a series of errors that meant the morning went pear-shaped.

They didn’t separate by ages, so all the kids went out simultaneously. Not a great plan, but a forgivable oversight. The second problem was that they offered cash prizes for the most eggs found.

“I’ve never heard of this,” the shocked mum said.

“My son was the first to go out because of where we were in line and he was able to grab two or three while the rest of the kids were foaming at the mouth to get outside. After that, every time he reached for a little egg, some eight or nine-year-old would snatch it from his fingers.”

Ceris stood up for her son and asked the other kids to let the little boy have a chance, but she said the other parents scoffed and told their children to get as many eggs as they could.

In the end, Ceris’ son ended up with 11 chocolate eggs. “The top five kids all got over 100 eggs.”

But it wasn’t the quantity of eggs found or not found that irked her, it was the behaviour of the kids, and the way her little boy reacted.

“He looked up at me so confused and said, ‘Egg?’,” the heartbroken mum said. “It almost made me cry. He was so happy with his 11 eggs though. I think I’m going to throw them in our yard after his nap just so he can go collect them again.”

Easter egg hunts are mayhem

The commenters were disappointed, but not surprised by the other kids’ behaviour.

“Easter egg hunts are like legal thunder domes for children,” one person said. “It’s wild to see how nuts the kids get and how many parents treat it like a competition.”

“I went to one last night that ended in about two seconds because the parents pushed the kids over and grabbed all the eggs,” said another person.

But not all egg hunts are chaotic.

“Our strata hosted an egg hunt,” said one person. “It was separated into ages zero to four and five to 12. I was expecting chaos, but they had a rule limiting each child to 16 eggs. It was pretty nice, actually.”