You make a good point. It isn’t as if I’m opposed to family gatherings, as you know. Nor am I necessarily opposed to birthday parties (though I’m less excited about those), and I am very supportive of rite-of-passage events. That said, I do not see the current extravagance of those parties as being evolutions of traditional grateful celebrations of milestones reached; rather, the ones I’ve seen (and the ones I’m chiefly inveighing against) are attempts to compensate for not doing the simple, every-day things that good parents do coupled with misplaced emphasis on the supreme importance of the child.

I’m not suggesting that we as parents don’t mean well. We almost always do. But we’ve been so duped by the psychological babbling of Doctors of This and That that we forget these people almost never have any actual parenting experience. My mother never wrote a book, but she knew a whale of a lot more about raising children than Dr. Spock. And in my house, we had a community birthday party every FOUR YEARS.

In many cultures the first birthday has traditionally been celebrated even more than the birth of the child. Because if the child made it to a year there was a pretty good chance it would live to be an adult. Being born didn’t mean much, but making it to a year did. So families celebrated. It’s a tradition, it’s an excuse to get together, it’s a way of saying that they care about each other, it’s a way of saying that human life is valuable and should be treasured and rejoiced over. It’s a good thing even if it seems silly to those of us who have no such tradition.

READERS: See link above.