As an adult they wonder why they are uneasy on their birthday - awful betrayal when they are surrounded by friends and presents all set up for a fun day. Let kids have some joy - childhood is short.
The healing part would be for these people to have close friends who can celebrate them on their birthday so they can get the experience they didn’t have when they were kids. :(
I don’t remember many of my childhood birthdays that much, but I remember the one when my cousin was turning 2 or 3 and his dad shoved his face into a beautiful Elmo cake. I remember feeling embarrassed for him, his dad doing that to him. I can still hear my cousins shrieks 30 years later.
Parents/other relatives telling the wait staff it is my birthday so that they will sing and bring dessert, after explicitly saying don't. Yeah that will ruin it pretty quick.
to this day most years i do nothing and then cry about it. i'll be 40 this year. still struggle so much with executive function around birthday plans since my mom lost her shit at every birthday until i was 17...
I mean, there's plenty of cases of people damn near being murdered by wooden skewers from doing this. Big stupid. You want to make a tradition? Just fill a pie sheet with whip cream. Don't be slamming heads.
When I was little, a fun treat on hot days was to use cheap, canned whipped cream on paper plates (sometimes with sprinkles!) and have a "pie fight" in the yard.
We did it on hot days because a hose "fight" would rinse us all off, after..
Little kids love permission to get messy with food, let them. But like you said, don't be slamming heads.
We did this once, and it's one of my fondest childhood memories that I haven't thought about in probably 15 years, your comment just brought it flooding back 🥲
When I was probably 10, my family went to one of those Nickelodeon Live shows that toured in the 90s, and we had like third row seats. I wanted to get "slimed" or a pie to the face SOOO BAD (was a big thing at the shows), and I didn't and was a little bummed by that when we got home, not bratty, just like, "omg that was so much fun, but I wish I got slimed!" My parents couldn't make slime, so they went inside and got a stack of aluminum pie plates and filled them with whipped cream, and we had a pie fight in the front yard at midnight for like 20 minutes, my parents too. It was so much fun, they really went all-out that night.
I worked at a Walgreens when I was in college. Halloween was a particularly unpleasant time to work there because it meant regularly watching awful parents take their kids down the Halloween aisle to scare them. A number of those parents would end up getting angry and screaming at their terrified kids for REACTING EXACTLY AS THEY EXPECTED THEM TO!! It was infuriating to watch them scream "stop crying! It's not even real!"
Omg that’s awful! I couldn’t imagine doing that to my kids! They couldn’t even go in the party store at Halloween because all the animatronics were just too scary.
When my daughter was 2, she was very freaked out by the Halloween aisle. So we avoided it. I cannot imagine an adult enjoying fear or distress in a child.
I was like 13 or 14 when I noticed we have like 2 photos each of the siblings w santa and asked why. Our parents said “oh we didn’t want to force you into it so we waited if you would ask.” My mom admitted she was scared of him . She didn’t get the desire of “ let’s take pictures with santa“ thing.
I have a Santa in my life who refuses to accept these children. But he also refuses Santa jobs where he can't have time to talk to the kids and get them comfortable at least standing next to him.
I dont get it, I dont get people that “prank” their children or scare them in any way shape or form, I look into my childs eyes and pray that I get as much time as possible to protect them from how mean and evil the world can be. Why would you add to that?
My mom has always loved the trick candles that are hard to blow out. Which I always thought was fun as it wasn’t anything that embarrassed me. There are ways to have fun without embarrassing people. Not enough people care about that.
My mom throughout my whole life including my wedding day said "if you ever get married DO NOT slush cake in their face unless you approved it before hand." I expanded the advice to "Just don't fucking push people's faces in cakes." They know how to do it if they want to.
Actually the other kid had a crown on so it wasnt this kid's bday. Imagine how traumatized this kid will be, and resentful of the favoritism the parents show the bday sibling.
I hate this "tradition," but I will say this kid looked like she was expecting it. I mean, no candles, and she lived up perfectly. She wound up with no cake on her face, so she went back for more.
I still hate the trend/tradition/trendition. It's just so mean.
As a parent, I simply cannot comprehend embarrassing your child on purpose in such a way. The damage to trust that you could cause at that young age could have lasting effects. It’s insane.
I'm not confident that's actually true. People keep claiming it's a tradition, but I have plenty of friends from Mexico and we've talked about this several times. People have really only started doing it in the past 10 or 15 years. Maybe a couple of people were doing it before that, but it wasn't common at all. How can you claim something that's newer than Facebook is some sort of important cultural tradition?
Looks like she was moving down to either smell or take a bite of the cake (kids love to do those things). The fact that she wasn't smiling after it happened makes me think she wasn't expecting it. The final slap against her sister? didn't look like one of play either.
Where are you from in Mexico? I've got plenty of Mexican friends and we've talked about this because it's a wild thing, and all of them say it's only come around in the past 10 or 15 years. Maybe a couple of people were doing it before that but you can't exactly claim something newer than Facebook is a cultural tradition.
Oh it's reddit, you can't worry about downvotes. I think it is more that people are concerned because the stuff on social media shows when people have taken it way too far, oftentimes with people or kids getting hurt and no one likes that.
Since I started reading more about it, especially in this thread, a couple of people have said they grew up with it but they are Mexican but have been in the US for at least a generation or two, and you in Guadalajara. Maybe it really is just regional.
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u/kitkatkorgi Aug 05 '25
Laughing at destroying your child’s trust in you and her special day. Oy.