By Charlotte Mason-Curl
If the idea of a tat-filled party bag makes your toes curl, or the expense of buying gifts for every party your child gets invites you to fill you with dread…you are not alone.
Feelings towards the gifting culture at children’s parties range from mild unease, to pure venom. But one thing’s for sure, very few people love it.
I’m somewhere in the middle.
Thoughtful, conscious gifting is fun (in my opinion) - particularly for children. But the expense and waste of our current culture drives me mad.
So, I’ve decided to try and do something about it…The Kid’s Party Pact.
But before we get into that, let’s rewind three years…
My wakeup call
I was a sleep deprived new Mum overwhelmed with love, but also something else - fear.
I’d just completed Carbon Literacy training and the timescales of climate change hit me. When my beautiful, innocent daughter is my age it’s very likely that large parts of the world will be uninhabitable.
Shit (a serious understatement).
When enveloped with a sense of doom - the best thing you can do is to take action.
Even small steps can make you feel more positive. While you won’t single handedly solve climate change, you will influence those around you, and make some impact however tiny (and all these tiny actions add up).
It began with beer, and toy swapping
I decided to set up and host a Toy Swap for local parents - at a local brewery to lure them along. It’s now become an annual event.
The feedback was overwhelmingly positive. Parents were delighted to snap up their kid’s Christmas gifts for free, and without bringing more plastic tat into the world.
Many conversations (*rants) later, it became clear that people wanted to save money and avoid buying unwanted, unsustainable stuff for other people’s children. But entrenched social norms make this feel hard to do in reality.
What if we parents decide to do things differently?
These conversations, and frustration with the levels of plastic tat I was seeing at children’s parties led me to the idea of The Kids Party Pact.
If enough parents agree to make children’s parties friendlier on the finances and the planet – then surely we can create a new social norm?
A culture where children’s parties centre around joyful experiences, not consumerist habits feels like a positive one - right?
If you like the sound of this, join the movement and help make it happen!
