This is not about one particular community Easter egg hunt. I have been to Easter egg hunts in different locations and had similar experiences to the one I am writing about here. But without mentioning the specific Easter egg hunt that I brought my seven-year-old to, I would like to say this: If I decide to bring my child to a community Easter egg hunt in the future, she will have to wear knee pads, elbow pads, and a helmet. I am only half-kidding here.
The egg hunt seemed a good idea, in general and especially for my daughter. She has no close-in-age siblings at home, no cousins in the area, with whom to race around and giggle at a low-stakes family egg hunt, so while I'm sure she gets a certain delight from her mine-all-mine solo egg hunting experiences, I have often felt that she was missing something of the shared experience I had hunting for Easter eggs when I grew up.
The throngs of people milling around clutching baskets and bags should have been my first clue that this was going to be something of a free-for-all. The fact that kids were to wait behind a line of tape which would be cut as if for racing might have been my second clue.
Of course, the requisite "rules" were announced over loudspeaker-- no running, no pushing, no grabbing, no hogging--but even as this was happening, I could hear snippets of conversation from two categories of parents: the ones who were reiterating the importance of kindness, and the ones who were talking strategy. ("Ok, Junior, run for the eggs in the middle and to the side--there's a bunch there, and kids will be grabbing the closer ones first."
The countdown began. The tape was cut. And while my daughter disappeared into a sea of children, I meandered around and observed.
There were a few kids showing kindness. One actually came to the aid of a peer she did not seem to know whose eggs had fallen out of her bag. Another began to run, then slowed himself to allow some littler kids to get to some eggs. In the frenzied atmosphere of the hunt, I was extra impressed by these moments of caring and generosity.
But. I also observed some children shoving. I saw a child taunting a younger child who had managed to find only one egg. And at the end of the hunt, when my daughter ran into a friendof hers, I was disheartened to hear her father's description of seeing older kids literally grabbing eggs out of his daughter's hands.
My daughter ended up with a very small number of eggs. She was a little disappointed, but perked up when I told her how proud I was that she had participated in a way that was fair, gentle and kind.
Will I bring her to a community egg hunt in the future? I'm really not sure. I get the idea that it's fun and challenging to hunt for eggs and try to amass a larger bounty than other kids. But when rudeness, roughness, and self-centeredness is the ticket to the greatest Easter egg hunt "success", is this really what we want to be teaching our kids?
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