Why I Won't Be Following This Easter Egg Hunt Trend

It’s Easter week, which means there’s been lots of chocolate-bunny-themed posts popping up in my Facebook feed. I love hearing how friends went on Cadbury egg benders and seeing the cute Easter bonnet shots (and the hilariously creepy Easter bunny shots). But one post made me do a double take: Color-coded egg hunts. As in, each kid gets assigned a certain color egg and is only allowed to collect those pre-designated eggs. At first the OCD-er in me was drawn to the pretty picture with all the order. The buckets match the eggs! I almost hit "like" but then I realized how much I dislike the idea. The post I read touted it as a way to “keep it all fair.” For real? This is so not for me. Here’s why:

For one, this level of organization just adds more work and feels like part of the Pinterest, whatever-you're-doing-now-is-not-good-enough campaign to stress me out. Can’t we just scatter a bunch of eggs in the backyard and let the children loose? You have to tell kids who just sat still(ish) through mass and are already hopped up on Peeps that they can only go for certain eggs? That kind of micromanaging is just not my style. Nor is the forethought required for having an equal amount of each different colored egg.

Second, must everything be rigged to be fair? Feels a little helicopter parenty to me, emblematic of the “everyone gets a trophy” world we seem to be living in now. Does each kid get a golden egg, too? (Growing up our hunts had an oversized egg with five or ten bucks in it; if you found that you were, well, golden. But there was only one.) I’m the middle of three close-in-age daughters and you better believe no one made sure everything was equal for us our whole life. And you know what? We’re better for it. I know, I know, this is Easter eggs we’re talking about but still. Even these little ways that parents get involved in the outcome of kids’ activities can chip away at their ability to figure shit out on their own — and to learn to handle disappointment. I mean it’s not like Lord of the Flies in my backyard but I do think that kids — even the smaller ones — can learn to police themselves. That may mean some arguing but hey, that’s what family holidays are all about, right?

I hosted a non color-coded egg hunt last weekend with my sisters’ families (seven kids in total) and it all went well enough. Obviously we wouldn’t have let the older ones pillage from the little ones and we did ask the big kids to hunt the harder-to-find eggs but really we just let them do their thing. And we watched the 4-year-old help the 1-year-old fill her basket and the 6-year-old re-hide some of the eggs he’d gotten so the younger ones could get more (he also had to be told to slow down — the kid is fast). And when two kids went for the same egg, they got a little heated but they worked it out. As kids get older I think part of the fun is the competition and learning that not everyone has to wind up with the same amount (and not everyone gets the golden egg!) and you know what? That's life.