Celebrating Birthdays During COVID-19

If your child’s birthday falls in the coming months, explaining to your child that their birthday can’t be celebrated anymore is not only hard on the child to come to terms with and understand, but it also puts a damper on you as a parent. Over and over again, my kiddo keeps asking to go outside and play with friends. Let’s be honest, explaining social distancing is hard enough, especially when it’s from everyone outside of your family, but also canceling a birthday? It’s heartbreaking!

The good news is that you can always count on humanity to come up with a creative way to celebrate. On the news as of recent, they played a highlighted story on a social distancing birthday party where everyone who was invited drove their cars in a parade-like way, with windows rolled down, decorated posters and banners hanging outside the doors of the cars, and each car that passed threw out some sort of gift to the birthday kid who stood at the driveway waving to all of his friends who passed. A few gifts had to be handed to one of the parents, but still, this idea has swept the nation through social media, and I think we can all agree that we’re living for it. 

If your child has a birthday that is falling in these upcoming weeks or months, this idea is near genius, albeit unconventional. In these times, nothing can be conventional. Parents have certainly been integrating their lives in the best way they can by social distancing, and all it takes is a bit of creativity! Parents decorating cars for a friend of their child can be truly inspiring for our youth, and also help your children understand the troubling times that we face, in the most lighthearted way that we can!

There is an image on Facebook that discusses a hypothetical conversation of a college student in 2030 asking their parents about the 2020 crisis. In this story, the parent talks about the virus and asks the kid, don’t you remember being out for school? The student then says, yea but I don’t remember being scared, I remember all the games and fun we had. It’s unique, creative experiences like a birthday parade, that will get us to have this kind of conversation in the future.  

So the question is, what else can we do to continue this ingenious streak of ideas of social distancing activities for your kids? Let us know!