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Young children at birthday parties love playing solo, much to the discomfort of parents
Jerry Seinfeld once said your first birthday party and your last are quite similar, in that it’s generally arranged for you and you have to be told who your friends are. I think about this a lot when my son ends up at a little pal’s soiree and we watch the assembled children attempt to make sense of the rituals we’re forcing on them. Just last week he was at his dear friend Bill’s house for a birthday party and studiously ignored him the entire time. I mean, I say dear friend, but as Seinfeld suggests, I’m not sure if my son knows that he has any dear friends – or wants them for that matter.
It’s one of those weird bits of parenting that makes you feel like a child yourself; wielding your infant like an inanimate object, an incompatible toy forced to play with some unsuited partner. It’s the same way I might have made my sister’s Barbie hang out with a stack of pogs, or driven Spiderman around in the Batmobile alongside his steadfast partner, a shiny Panini sticker of the 1996 Bayern Munich squad. Continue reading...