Colourful Easter Eggs are easy to spot on a frozen field of snow
The stories will roll out again this weekend about parents dominating Easter Egg hunts and helicoptering over kids to make sure their little pride and joy gets the biggest and best treats.
This weekend, I took the boys to attack a local Easter event that served up bunny races, pancake breakfast, and play area before heading outside to hunt for eggs.
The parents were great. We stood back and helicoptered just enough to make sure the kids didn’t fall in the mud, or slide on the ice. The kids ran and gathered up as many plastic eggs as they could. It wasn’t as many as they would have liked, because of the tweens.
The Bieber set dominated our event. 10-13 year olds who didn’t have parents hovering to make sure they were safe, devoured the field of treats like a pack of wolves. While young kids need to be shepherded around at ‘family events’, tweens can be dumped off by a parent and then picked up a few hours later. They’re old enough to ‘look after themselves’ at a family friendly event, but without the watchful eye of a parent, they have no sense of anything other than selfishness.
The tweens didn’t grab one of the bright, cute baskets to gather the eggs, they simply rolled up their shirts and stuffed in as many as they could. Think of the grubby Halloween kid in a hoodie pulling a 7 hour shift trick or treating – this was the Easter Egg Hunt equivalent. The tweens were greedy, relentless, and had no problem elbowing kids half their age out of the way. It was terrible.
But the organizers had them beat. Instead of actual treats inside each plastic egg, the point was to have some fun running around the field gathering eggs before heading back into the hall to approach the Easter Bunny throne. No matter how many eggs you had in your basket, one or a hundred, each child was given a bag with a large handful of treats. The greedy tweens got the same amount as the bashful toddlers. Problem solved.
It was an awesome day with crafts, face painting, real bunnies, costumed bunnies, and lots of smiles – no thanks to the greedy tweens.
Great Story – Good on the Organizers for their insight