How to Start a Home-Based Childrens Birthday Party Business (Home-Based Business Series)

How to Start a Home-Based Children's Birthday Party Business (Home-Based Business Series) [Amy Jean Peters] on leondumoulin.nl *FREE* shipping on.
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And I just find throwing them traumatic. I'd do anything rather than give a party I just don't like it. The enormous pressure of children's parties, the increasing materialism and commercialisation identified by numerous informants, reveals an entirely contradictory relation between discourse and practice.

On the one hand, like Joanna, mothers spoke nostalgically of the small scale, kin-based parties they experienced themselves as children and lamented the rise in commercial intervention. Yet on the other hand, the very same mothers regularly incorporated party services and mass-produced goods into their party provisioning.

A typical commercial enterprise aimed precisely at mothers like Joanna is Party Pieces; a catalogue and on-line service dedicated to the accessorization of children's parties, offering goods such as fancy dress outfits, decorated paper cups, party games and prizes, banners and balloons. Mothers receiving the catalogue complete a form listing the dates of their children's birthdays and receive the catalogue in the post two months prior to the date of a specific child's birthday.

As well as providing ideas for themed parties the catalogue appealed to mothers such as Philipa despite awareness of paying over the odds for the merchandise as an expedient way of shopping while creating innovative parties;. The expansion of formal businesses into the previously 'home-made' arena of 'dressing-up' and 'fancy dress' costumes and accessories seems further testament to some mothers of the commercialisation of children's worlds. As well as catalogues featuring festive wares, more recently a local woman in the neighbourhood had been organising 'children's fancy dress direct-sales parties', showing a range of costumes from Dracula to Fairy Queens.

Gathering together in the house of a volunteer hostess, mothers sip wine and handle a range of children's fancy and dressing-up wear and choose from a stand-up cardboard model showing prices descriptions and costume types. In general, the costumes were considered overly simple in relation to the prices charged for them.

A pirate costume, for example, consists of a black patch and a pair of shorts resembling pyjama bottoms; an ensemble several mothers considered insultingly easy to have put together themselves. However, Sally, despite being aware that the items must have been made with a large profit margin in mind, bought a 'beautifully made satin cloak' to dress her daughter as a vampire as she admitted she would never have 'got around' to making such an article herself.

Other items, fairy dresses and ballet costumes merely consisting of a piece of white nylon netting hanging on a piece of elastic, were seen as unacceptable in terms of their value for money and "too embarrassing" to purchase. For some mothers the overt commodification of the catalogue undermines the entire project of the children's party and takes away the creativity of inventing games, costumes, decorations and prizes.

Jane, for example, enjoys making homemade items, to create a co-ordinated theme.


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She used the closeness of Halloween to her daughter Rachel's birthday as a theme for her fifth birthday party, organised in conjunction with another mother, in the local church hall. As it was a fancy dress event, Jane had spent several evenings sewing a witch's outfit for her daughter from scraps of fabric from a local remnant store. She made jamboree bags filled with 'bits and bobs' from Woolworth's and had cut out paper decorations to string across the walls of the hall.

Both mothers spent evenings carving out pumpkin lanterns and hand-made invitations with pop-up ghosts had been sent to around twenty children. A birthday cake in the shape of a 'scary monster' with the names of the two girls iced on top formed the centrepiece of the food. Working to a limited budget, Jane viewed the creative aspect of the party-making as crucial element of its value and she encouraged Rachel and her small brother to make invitations and decorations at the kitchen table with her. The night before the event Rachel insisted on abandoning her proposed witch's costume insisting instead on dressing as a 'good fairy'.

As well as preparing the party food of pizza, cheese sticks, jelly and fruit, Jane set about constructing a fairy costume from white netting and tinsel, to pacify her distraught daughter;. I couldn't believe it! I felt like selling the witch outfit I'd made to another mother for a Halloween party!

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The disappointment expressed by Jane in undermining her fully orchestrated event is not unusual. Despite the pressure, sheer labour and anxiety involved in dressing, transporting and equipping children for their attendance of birthday parties it is most often the children, rather than parents, who resist attending the events. On several occasions in the course of the ethnography there were heated 'scenes' between mothers and children when, often a short time before the commencement of a party, a child had firmly refused to leave their home or get out of the car at the venue.

As well as the resources required for the organisation of children's birthday parties a number of strategies are employed to deal with the sheer volume of gifts required in the attendance of the yearly 'rounds' of parties. Jenny, for example, uses a two-tier approach to birthday gifts for her children's friends as also described in Sirota's study of children's birthday gift-giving in Paris. For general school friends' parties she uses a collection of Woolworth's items, amassed throughout the year in the course of everyday household shopping trips. For closer friends' and best friends' birthday parties she uses the Early Learning Centre catalogue and specific shopping trips to make selections.

She also keeps a bulk of children's birthday cards in a drawer of the living room cupboard and uses the corner shop 'in emergencies' if she runs out of appropriate cards. For members of her own family Jenny uses trips abroad, for example, to try to find items a little more special. Although family gifts can be postponed, delivered at a later date, gifts for the children's of other mothers are a more pressing concern and onerous task;. Most of the presents I buy are for the children to take to parties Cultural economists, Levinson, ; Zelizer, , , have identified activities such as children's birthday parties, and their gift economies, as significant testament to children's economic activity.

Although, as asserted by more recent theoretical approaches to the research of childhood James, ; Christensen; James, , children are not merely objects of socialisation or 'adults-in-the-making', their agency here is internalised by the mothers and integrated as a vital part of the cultural and aesthetic repertoire of the desired birthday party. Anne, the mother of four children ranging from seven to eleven years sees herself as 'an old-hand' at the birthday party gift buying.

Although her children are now old enough to assert their opinions and choices regarding appropriate presents Anne still uses a pragmatic 'bulk-buy' approach to children's gift purchase. During the sales she identifies the kind of coveted children's items that are still fashionable enough to be sort after but destined to be replaced by a newer fad or edition, thereby reduced in price but not fully redundant in meaning.

In the course of this ethnography Power Rangers plastic action figures were popular, for example, and Anne, on one particular shopping trip, found several items at special sale prices in the local department stores. She took the opportunity to buy them up in the hope that they would suffice for a number of parties the children would be attending later that year.

By choosing such fashionable and child-centred objects Anne takes a risk that they be rendered completely undesirable by the time they are used as gifts thus placing her children in the embarrassing position of offering potentially 'out of date' presents. On the other hand she may manage to maximise contemporary appeal and price, thereby out-doing what she described as the 'rip-off kids merchandisers' into the bargain. The type and extent of thought that went into gifts also revolved around the closeness a mother felt to understanding the gift repertoire of her 'group'; 'I just bought a jigsaw and it took all of one minute to chose - not because I didn't care but because it was just right.

It's the kind of thing we buy for each other's kids'. More anonymous or general types of presents bubble bath, stickers, etc. Celia, for example, used a two-tier price range directly correlating to the relationship she had with the mother of the child in question;.


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    5. Books and jigsaws are often given to the children of mothers less integrated into a group, as they are considered thoughtfully appropriate and imminently practical as they can be easily exchanged at local shops if duplicated. As well as creating a rationale behind the selection of gifts, the price limit and gift typing helped prevent further escalation of a performative party culture that, as previously mentioned, many informants viewed as potentially punitive.

    In some cases, mothers identified birthdays as times when children were most likely to make direct comparisons between themselves and individuals in their peer groups with the potential for revealing inequalities of wealth and creating ruptures with the group. In her study of social solidarity and the gift economy, Komter observes how contemporary society has moved from an "organic" Durkheimian model of solidarity, to one built upon non-committal, segmented solidarities; 'cities, villages, quarters, and neighbourhoods have become hybrid and fragmented.

    Families can do without a neighbourhood if they like, and neighbourhoods do not need families. No longer tied to mutual dependency and necessity, solidarities are formed as autonomous entities that, argues Komter, may increasingly come to rely upon the model of the gift economy to generate any form of mutually moral obligation.

    As women have been, and remain, the principle agents of 'gift work' Cheal; ; Schrift, ; Strathern, ; Weiner, , the perpetuation of such solidarities is 'clearly gendered' Komter, , p. Just as the fragmented solidarities generated through the networks of children's parties, mothers, infants and goods generate inclusion they also generate forms of exclusion. Although ambivalence towards holding children's parties is not necessarily experienced in direct relation to the financial security or affluence of a given household, for certain mothers the obligations of children's parties present an overt form of social tyranny.

    Jill a young, single mother with two children the eldest four years old living in Sparrow Court council estate, on welfare support can barely cover the costs of her monthly bills yet she understands her ability to attend the birthday parties of her children's classmates as a basic requisite of sociality as a mother;.

    I've been to nearly six so far [this year], but it's dreadful because their birthday is coming and I haven't got the money to buy them anything to have a party or anything. Carrie [daughter] has been to quite a few [classmates' parties] and one of David's [son] friends had to go to McDonalds and it's really expensive especially when there's about twelve or fourteen children and I can't even afford to get David a birthday card, let alone a party or anything. I feel quite embarrassed when they have to keep going to parties and I haven't really got a present but I sort of manage to get something like a colouring book from over the road [the corner shop] to show I appreciate going.

    Another mother, Irene, also living in Sparrow Court, with a younger son, categorically declares that she can no longer afford 'kids parties';. So none this year, but what can you do? For Lola, a South American mother of two children recently moved to Jay Road, the choosing of birthday gifts for English children's parties is a fraught task in which she tries to reduce risk to a minimum.

    Lola is relatively unfamiliar with the local shopping area and depends on mail order catalogues almost exclusively for her non-food household provisioning. Although her two daughters are well versed in the gift and party etiquette of Chilean culture English birthday parties are a new form of sociality that have arisen through the girls recently formed friendships at the local school.

    Lola has little idea of how English children's parties operate and discovered, for example, through two embarrassing mistakes, that an invitation is confined to the named child and does not extend to a sibling. Unlike many other children, Anita and Sofia play a significant role in choosing the gifts they take to their separate birthday parties as Lola relies almost exclusively on their experience and judgement. Together the mother and daughters read the Argos and Index store catalogues and the girls' select the presents, then, Lola visits the shop to buy them.

    The most recent gift, for example, was a pink snow-storm globe and a sewing craft kit bought for Anita's closet school friend. Unlike other mothers on the street Lola, despite her low income, buys the gifts on an individual and full-price basis and with only the guidance of her children, rather than the interactions of other mothers, to help her.

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    Whereas Bell and Ribbens's study of mothers' social networks considered how places and spaces of mothering 'allow' women to meet 'women of like mind, like children and the same social class' Bell; Ribbens, , p. In the culture of the children's birthday parties mothers circulate their offspring, gifts and creativity in the generation of a sociality which exists in a constant tension between normative, competitive and expressive relations.

    Although children's parties exist across a spectrum of class and ethnic groups, this article reveals the processes by which certain types of mothering in this case what evolves as a type of middle class mothering might exist at the expense of the prominence of others. Mothers such as Jill, the single woman on the housing estate and Lola the South American mother, are not merely precluded from the children's 'party circuit' through lack of economic resources. They are excluded by the social and cultural domination of other solidarities of mothering at large in the locality; solidarities formed through endless rounds of children's parties and its ensuing gift economy.

    This domination may have real consequences, in for example, aiding access to certain types of schools though facilitation of local knowledge or other related resources. While birthday parties might be understood as a crude series of escalating potlatches in terms of the colloquial concept of competitive gifting that followed the popularisation of the term after Mauss , in actual fact the parties are far removed from this sense of direct competitive giving. Rather, they involve subtle and skilful positioning through a series of normative stages, each of which has its associated strategies and potentials.

    While there is at once a desire to use goods and gifts to express relationships and their depth honouring a particular mother or child, for example with a more 'individually' chosen gift the notion of the 'going rate' for the price of a children's party gift is crucial to the maintenance of 'sameness'.

    Despite the discourse regarding the unwanted intervention of the market into the 'authentic' relations of everyday domesticity, commercial services and goods are used by women to alleviate the pressures of potlatch party culture, and the potential for overly oppressive, idealised versions of competitive mothering.

    For venues such as Monkey Business soft-play venue, McDonalds fast food chain and Party Pieces catalogue, offer a less risky, neutralised default to the individually organised event. While American home-making guru Martha Stewart or Camilla Knowles type renditions of creative, expressive mothering might be popularly aspired to, in this ethnographic context they are regarded with the highest suspicion as they pose the greatest threat to a culture of negotiated 'sameness'. The woman most likely to garner admiration is the mother who 'gets away' with pulling off the most affective party with the minimal effort and expense, all within the bounds of the accepted aesthetic of the group.

    The means by which women generate and perpetuate sociality in urban societies has been a crucial area of feminist scholarship, as has been the pressures of externally prescribed ABSTRACTions such as 'respectability' and normativity Gullestad, , ; Oliker, ; Skeggs, , But few studies tie this sociality to broader issues of a 'feminist economics' Still, ; Zelizer, , and the ways in which the commercialisation of mothering may enable, as much as exploit, women's contribution to the making of the 'social texture' of society Komter, Much literature deservedly deals with the social isolation of women as mothers, but, as is made evident by the ethnographic descriptions above, 'mothering' in fact operates as a key form of sociality.

    Contrary to Allan's depiction of British social relations Allan, , p. Their absence from the minutely detailed exchanges women make with, and around, other mothers and children in the course of social rituals such as children's birthday parties, impacts significantly on their role as potential care-givers Radin, by excluding them from sensitively balanced culture of sameness their partners have sought to cultivate. This carefully negotiated culture of sameness seen in the contemporary cult of children's birthday parties potentially allows women the opportunity for alternative modes of locally contested renditions of being a mother.

    But, as Komter argues there are also negative consequences emerging from a kind of solidarity that insures 'some people are excluded from the community whereas others are included, although sometimes at the cost of their own autonomy'. In this respect, a feminist discourse that once described the contradictions of women's consistent willingness to engage in 'invisible' labour has increasingly turned instead to the minutiae of the material culture and consumption of mothering and childhood as a means of analysis Gutman; Connick-Smith, ; Layne, ; Taylor; Layne; Wozniak, ; Zelizer, Kinship and friendship in modern Britain.

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    How to Start a Home-Based Children's Birthday Party Business

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