A Different View with Dave O’Connell

There was a time when the essence of a children’s birthday party was twenty rugrats belting each other with cushions from the couch in one room, while the parents drank beer and gin and tonic – and probably smoked – in the kitchen.

These days, children’s birthday parties are an altogether more sophisticated – and expensive – proposition, with a degree of professional help not out of the question for many.

Which goes some way to explaining why a recent survey in the US revealed that the average cost of a children’s birthday party is now somewhere north of $300.

‘Three hundred bucks?’ was my first thought. Are they putting on free drink or applying for a bar extension?

And then I remembered that our own days of throwing a child’s birthday party – if you excuse the coming-of-age events held out of our immediate presence in the garden shed – occurred the bones of twenty years ago.

Go back a little further into your own childhood and your expectations in going to your pal’s house for his birthday was that it wouldn’t be just sandwiches; that there would be Rice Krispie buns – or at least ordinary buns – and maybe crisps and Fanta too.

There was always a cake, of course, but back then it was a simple affair, invariably made by mammy and without the first chapter of a small book iced into the top of it.

There was no invitation required for two reasons – the world hadn’t even thought of email and anyway we all lived, more or less, on the same street.

So we didn’t have to be driven there and collected by precise appointment three hours later. There was no enclosed schedule – these days it’s all bouncy castles or bowling or children’s play centres, followed by McDonald’s – because the further you got from the kitchen was out the back to play.

There were no magicians (unless you include quite a few fathers who could magically disappear) or children’s entertainers; nobody dressed up as a Disney character and there was no one who could shape three orange balloons into an uncanny image of the former, and maybe future, President of the United States.

By the time, we ourselves were the hosts back in the noughties, this was already evolving into a more sophisticated proposition whereby you would no longer get away with a plate of buns, a bottle of pop and a few packets of crisps in paper bowls.