Resisting "Boys" and "Girls"

less you've got a few hours to spare and a mind inclined towards lingering digressions then this isn't the time or the place to go right off on one about the increasingly harsh gender divisions being peddled to parents and children and why this is a Bad Thing. But when it comes to planning parties, gifts and celebrations for the ones that are old enough to have opinions and young enough to have them influenced, surely even the most rigidly traditionalist would have to admit that dividing the party guests into Boys and Girls throws up a whole load of unnecessary potential problems. First of all, you can get landed with an unpredictable variation in numbers when someone can't come due to an outbreak of nits or vomiting and someone else unexpectedly cancels their prior engagement in order to belatedly accept your invitation, so instead of six boys and seven girls you now have eight girls and five boys - but six blue monster place settings and seven flower fairy ones - and the party shop has just gone out of business. Sometimes, too, depending on either your local demographics and the preferences of your children, you could end up with 12 guests of one gender and two of the other: emphasising sex-role separation here will make the party something of a test of endurance for the children of the minority gender. Also, it's not at all uncommon to not know the parents of your own children's friends that well and to find yourself lumbered with some incredibly hairy-legged sandal wearers who will spend the entire party wittering at you about social conditioning despite the fact that their own children are gleefully embracing every sexist stereotype they can think off while stuffing themselves with all the refined sugar, salt and fat they don't get allowed at home either.More importantly there will always be at least one child who doesn't understand in the least why he/she can't have the "inappropriate" toy or cup or game or cake, thus causing half the adults to offer well-meaning but reactionary advice to that child's parents and the rest to tut and sigh about either bad behaviour or peculiar parenting. While it might be very tempting to the more mischievously liberal of us to try and enforce a gender-boundary-crossing regime on preschoolers and dress all the boys as princesses while giving all the girls power tools to play with, it saves on so many headaches and contributes so much more to world happiness present and future to set aside gender roles for small children and just let them have fun. Yet all the toy manufacturers and caterers seem worryingly keen to divide everything into Pink and Blue, so how can you get round it? Here are a few helpful suggestions. Hopefully.

Party Themes

Jungle Animals

One of the few non-gender-obsessed themes that actually does seem to have been taken up by the corporations: you can actually get plates, banners etc that just depict an assortment of lions, tigers, bears, parrots, hippos etc. If you're moderately artistic you can supply a load of cheap plain white paper plates, art materials and get the kids making animal masks for themselves as the party activity.

Seaside

This one's good in warm weather if you have outside space: you can fill and feature a paddling pool, use a blue and green colour scheme, maybe fill a bowl with playsand and stick a few wrapped chocolate coins in it so the children can dig for "treasure"... There are also quite a few fishing-themed games that can be adapted to large or medium sized groups of children.

Circus

Make clown faces either with the paper plates as in the Jungle party or get some cheap face paints (Pound-shops are good for this sort of thing) and a steady-handed helper to paint clown make-up on the guests; for the slightly older end of the age range you could set up some balancing or juggling games.

Pizza

This one is good if you have a lot of fussy eaters to entertain: get cheap pizza bases and chop up lots of vegetables, grate cheese, maybe cut up some pieces of cooked ham or chicken (depending on how many guests are meat avoiders) and get the children to decorate pizzas as they see fit, then cook the pizzas and dish them up. This is perhaps not so good for groups larger than about 10 children unless you actually have a catering-sized oven and a huge kitchen.

Party Prizes

Theming these by gender is really stupid, it involves you in unnecessary expense if you have to buy two potential prizes per game and there is a much higher incidence of tears and rage from children who think that the prize you have deemed inappropriate for their gender is more desirable than what they have got. Art materials and books are pretty fail-safe, otherwise balls or outdoor toys (depending on your budget) are nice as well.

Party Bags

Sweeties, crayons and stickers and a slice of cake are perfectly adequate for these and again saves stress if they are all identical. In fact skip the sweeties if you have a lot of dietary restrictions among the guests and substitute little tubs of blowing-bubbles.

Eventually, sadly, there comes a point where your little darling refuses to entertain either nasty smelly boys or soppy silly girls at a birthday party, and you can relax. At least up until the stage where you start fretting that your offspring might be a little TOO enamoured of his or her own gender...