Have you ever taken your child to a public Easter egg hunt?
I have, and vowed to never subject my sweet, innocent little lamb to another hare-raising event like it ever again. NEVER. EVER. EVER. AGAIN!
Okay, maybe I’m being a bit dramatic. Never is a long time and my child is not always sweet or innocent, but she sure doesn’t charge at plastic eggs like wild animals let loose in the Serengeti.
Who am I kidding? Wild animals rushing around the Kenyan outback behave better than some of the aggressive parents who flock to local Easter egg hunts.
For centuries Easter egg hunts have been a rite of childhood. Unfortunately, in the last decade or so these charming events designed to delight youngsters have turned into cutthroat affairs complete with tears, name-calling, and in some extreme cases, cops to break up parent-on-parent fist-fights.
Way to celebrate the true meaning of Easter.
The increase in aggressive egg hunters has forced some cities to cancel their annual hunts, while others have modified the events to make them a bit more civil.
For example, organizers of a popular Dallas-based Easter egg hunt no longer offer cash awards for finding gold eggs. Winners now get stuffed animals. In Denver, local officials banned parents from the field after some overzealous adults rushed a local park last year filling their children’s baskets in hopes of taking home the grand prize—-tickets to a local amusement park and a DVD player. The bad eggs reportedly tore through the park gathering the colorful plastic ovals and left nothing for younger children whose parents actually allowed them to try to locate candy-filled ovum of their own.
I can relate to those parents. I took my daughter to a city sponsored Easter egg hunt a couple years ago and believe me the word “fun” doesn’t come close to describing the experience.
Despite ordering thousands of extra eggs, erecting caution tape around the field, and having older children hunt in an area separate from toddlers, the event was still chaotic. Personally, I blame the mosh pit environment solely on crazy parents. After all, we were positioned in the toddler/infant area where half the kids didn’t understand the concept of “hunting” for anything, and the other half were content teething on a single empty egg. There was no reason for aggressive adults (I use that term loosely) to knock kids (mine included) and unsuspecting rule-abiding parents over in their mad dash to collect eggs for their offspring, who could have cared less that their baskets were filled to the brim.
Pathetic.
Life is short and seeing who can collect the most eggs is not a reflection of superiority in my opinion.
That said my now preschool-age daughter will not be short changed because of narcissistic parents. She will still be participating in an Easter egg hunt this year; only it won’t take place in a public park. Rather, she will be egg hunting with a handful of her peers in our friend’s backyard.
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