With all the frenzy and chaos that kids’ birthday parties bring to hosting parents, it’s helpful to go into it with an idea about how to handle gifts. Unless you’ve specified ‘no gifts please’ on your child’s birthday party invitations, the gifts will arrive in all shapes and sizes, and you’ll need to be ready to handle two main decisions:
- When to open gifts
- Keeping track of them
When to Open Birthday Gifts
Wait Until After Party
For younger kids, it’s fairly standard practice to hold off on the gift-opening until the party is over and guests have left. It’s entirely up to you, but common wisdom points to a few good reasons why the under age five set aren’t the gift opening crowd:
- Getting small children to sit for any length of time, in order to watch someone else open gifts, particularly if there’s nothing in it for them, is a challenge.
- Most parents of kids in this age group have chosen the birthday child’s gift, so there’s even less interest for the guest children to pay attention.
Let Older Kids Enjoy Gift Opening
For kids in first grade and older, it’s entirely up to you whether to open gifts during the party, or whether to continue the practice of holding off until later. But there are some good reasons to prepare for it. Kids this age tend to take more ownership for the gifts they bring, and some push hard to have their gift opened. Gift opening during the party serves two key purposes that are also important at this age:
- Each party guest gets the chance to connect one-on-one with the birthday child during the moments that his or her gift is being opened. Coach your child ahead of time to thank every guest by name when they open a gift, as well as to know not to mention whether or not they already have a gift.
- Fill up some extra time at the end of the party to keep the group relatively under control while waiting for parents to arrive for pick-up.
Whenever your child gets to open his or her gifts, be ready with pen and paper (or iPhone) to take note of who brings what. You will want to oversee getting thank you notes out within two weeks of the birthday party. For fresh, fun birthday party invitations and thank you cards, check out the party invitations online at www.looklovesend.com.
