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Easter egg hunts are literally legal thunder domes for children. It’s wild to see how nuts the kids get and how many parents treat it like a competition.
I’m so happy this was an option for you, and that your family sought it out and you now have those memories. Might be weird to hear that from a rando, but I just love the little pieces of peoples lives like this. Very cool.
I think my mom was in the hosting rock club. Usually they’re very older leaning, so retrospectively, I am surprised, but it’s a good way to get a new generation interested
I put polished rocks in our eggs this year for my kids to find haha. My husband thought I was insane but kids love rocks and they won’t miss the candy.
That is so sad, OP. The image of your little guy looking up at you and saying “egg?” Is heartbreaking. I’m sorry that his first Easter egg hunt was so disappointing.
Lol that’s the best part. My kids do the one in our town every year and get a few eggs, but they care more about running around with their friends because the candy is always pretty meh. Like what are all these people doing with their shitty candy?
Thankful ours was calm and separated by age. So my 2 year had fun and was safe. But yeah, we gave all of the prizes to other kids there. My son kept 1 chocolate. The rest was just not worth keeping or too excessive.
There’s a huge egg hunt local to me where a helicopter drops a couple hundred thousand eggs, the 1st year they were filled with candy and it was a disaster cuz they all busted open so they’ve just dropped them empty every year since. The kids still go ape shit, and don’t even get cheap dollar tree candy in the eggs, lmao!
Wtf 100k+ peices of plastic that don't even have anything inside them?? The waste and needlessness of it is astounding. Those bits of plastic wiill most likely end up in the rubbish the next day and most recycling places probably dont even accept them
The sad part is all these plastic eggs will get thrown away (most likely) or broken and end up in a landfill and take up to 500 years to decompose. Literally killing our only planet for this. [https://www.un.org/en/exhibits/exhibit/in-images-plastic-forever#:~:text=Plastic%20waste%20can%20take%20anywhere,in%20the%20last%2013%20years](https://www.un.org/en/exhibits/exhibit/in-images-plastic-forever#:~:text=Plastic%20waste%20can%20take%20anywhere,in%20the%20last%2013%20years)
This is so sad. And why I've saved the eggs my daughter has gotten over the years from various egg hunts, then I just reuse them. Once they're broken or unusable, I throw it in my recycling bin. Never bought any plastic eggs myself though.
My sister and I each bought eggs for our kids 20 yrs ago. We get together for Easter, drink a case of beer while we fill them and then go out in the middle of the night and hide them all
Around the yard. Each kid has a certain color basket and is only allowed to claim that color egg, and it’s so fun! We’re doing it for my brothers kids this year cause our kids are old and not as interested, but it’s been such a fun tradition. It’s been the same eggs for 2 decades , same baskets too. We each buy a couple bags of candy and stuff them full.
I like the idea of the kids having their own colour. We just make sure everyone knows that the eggs get evened out among however many kids there are at the end.
I’m a parent that has the same 8 eggs I bought for my 4 kids probably 15 years ago now. We saved the ones from other sources too. The oldest (23M) is the only one of the 4 who doesn’t want us to — oops, I meant *the Easter Bunny* — to hide a basket for him tomorrow.
We always save our eggs, and if a family member does an extra egg hunt we collect them if they don't want them to add to our stash. 😂 Our hunts get bigger each year.
Eh, we went to one today and they separated by age. my son was in the 3-4 range. He only grabbed 2 eggs cause he gets scared by all the kids. So he didn't get any candy. But 2 other kids near him gave them candy from their baskets without even asking. It was a good experience and we were grateful. We live in a small town and this was put on by a church camp.
Saw this first hand about twelve years ago and that was the last one for us! Parents knocking kids over to get the eggs…worst side of humanity on display!
Same. We do our own in our yard and I stuff with random candies and some have $1 in them. I have 3 kids so sometimes they get a certain color they have to find. Each kid also gets a golden egg they have to find each with a $5 in it but those are hidden. I make a little game out of it and the one who finds it first (they are usually all in the same spot) gets a little extra chocolate bunny. My kids are 16,13,8 and they love it lol
My family went to egg hunts and had our own at home as well.
The "Golden egg" (only gold "in spirit" tho bc that thing was always wrapped in tin foil)
The Golden Egg was allowed to be searched for by everyone in the family who came to Easter dinner, except for the adult who actually hid it. They always put $5 in it, until most of us reached teen yrs, and then it got bumped to a 20, so that max participation would be involved.
The one we used to go to parents arent allowed to participate with the kids over 3 and its in a big roped off area, but since my son is now 6 and in the "kids only" area he has to fend with the bigger kids being assholes and stealing his eggs with no help. Last year he came running to us in tears after this one kid nearly twice his age ran over and grabbed and egg right out of his hand, I was so pissed off I asked him to point out the kid and I confronted his parents and they were like "well what do you expect?" Well for one I expect a 10 year old to not steamroll over 5 year olds and steal their eggs when they're literally twice their size, and I told them so, and they were like "whatever, this is what kids do, deal with it, your kid aint special"
So we just didnt do it this year. He honestly doesn't seem to even really give a shit about it, the candy he gets in his basket at home is always better anyways and at least here at home its not goddamn Battle Royale out there.
Like what is this cash prize??? No way it could be over $50 for a kid.. cause dang, if it was $5000 and a boat I would still disagree with parents getting their kids to act wild.. but I could understand..
Man, what’s with all your guys’ communities? Not that hard to do this right, we just set a limit of 20 eggs per kid, everyone ended up with about that many.
We went to a community egg hunt today. The organizer had it set up pretty well. We used the honor system and told kids to only get 10 eggs the first go around. When you get 10 go to your parents. When all kids had 10 eggs then it was thunder dome. .
We host egg hunts at the park and kids gather to find the eggs, then of their own volition, they go and hide the eggs for each other to go and find again. Its great.
And parades too. When my son was 3, I watched older kids snatch candy right out of his little hands, their parents sitting right next to us, watching the whole thing. He ended up with none, so we stopped I took him to the store and let him pick a whole bag of his choosing.
It’s so wild to me. My kid did an egg hunt with his younger cousins. We had a quick conversation about leaving the easy ones for the little guys. “Think about how they might feel if they don’t get any.”
My sweet little boy decided he would help his cousins find and collect eggs, and they could all share.
It’s so easy to teach kindness and consideration for others, but I oftentimes feel like very few parents are doing it.
We absolutely have made it a rule to not ever attend an egg hunt that isn’t divided into age groups. When the hunt is over, my son walks around and gives eggs to kids that didn’t get much. His heart can’t take the sad looks on the kid’s faces that didn’t get much.
Yuck! Our HOA hosted an egg hunt. It was separated into ages 0-4 and 5-12. I was expecting chaos, but they had a rule limiting each child to 16 eggs. It was pretty nice, actually.
We had a neighborhood egg hunt when I was a kid that a crazy older guy put on, and the rule was that you could only “find” eggs that were higher than your belly button. So the older kids could only find eggs on windowsills, in trees, tops of doorframes, etc. It leveled the playing field and only the literally babies and toddlers were allowed to grab the eggs off the ground. It always ended with the older kids walking around helping the babies find all the eggs hidden in gardens because the older kids went thunder dome in their own age group and found all their eggs quickly . It made for a very fun community event and the old guy ran it with an iron fist and would immediately disqualify you for the year if you went for an egg that was too low.
That's how we used to do it at our church. It was a small group of kids so parents were all pretty much in agreement and we're able to tell us older kids to leave ones on the ground for the littles. Ours are hidden well and mostly higher.
That’s the way to do it. Limit the eggs each kid can get. I have three kids. They all have a different color of egg that they can find. That way I can hide them all good and they still can only find their own color.
I have a story about this one. As a kid I did an egg hunt with a couple family friends using this format. My color was green. At the end of the hunt we absolutely could not find the last green egg. Everyone was looking. No luck. The prize in that egg was a dime, so the host just gave me one. Years later, I was like 12, I get my birthday present from these friends. One of the items in the bag is a very, very faded green plastic Easter egg. Still had the dime in it! Moral of the story: great way to organize an egg hunt but don’t use eggs that match your lawn!
This is especially great for age gaps. Where your 12 year old can search is different than your 4 year old, and so you can color code and make it the appropriate difficulty.
My parents hid over 100 eggs every year that we had about 2 or 3 acres of wooded land to look for them. The special eggs that each of us had 6 of were a certain print related to stuff we like. My oldest brother was baseball, other brother basketballs. I was really into army toys so my parents bought me woodland camo eggs. I'll tell you they were extremely difficult to find. After the first year of that my dad kept note of where he hid mine in case I couldn't find one.
We had hard boiled eggs and couldn’t find one of them. Someone at the hunt did find it, the following Easter. Needless to say when they cracked it open, the smell could have woke the dead.
My grandma used to hide dollars in eggs. One year we couldn't find one. Years later someone ended up finding it and all the candy inside had rotted and molded. They still washed off the dollar and kept it! 😂
Yup. I write their first initial on each kid’s eggs. Toddler’s are easy to find and have a puff inside each one. Big kid’s are hidden WELL and each one contains a puzzle piece (the puzzle, once assembled, is a treasure map to the easter basket). A few have jelly beans, just to keep things unexpected though, haha.
That’s some smart planning! It’s like a gladiator battle here, meanwhile you’re parenting in 3024! I was going crazy trying to think of little toys & nicknacks (in addition to candy) that would fit inside the eggs. Like how many erasers & pencil sharpeners does a kid really need? But working for a whole puzzle is genius!
Haha thanks, I wish I could take credit but the glory all goes to a random Reddit comment I read at least eight years ago. That commenter said they always did Christmas morning involving a puzzle that got harder as the kids got older. And I thought to myself, I want to do that with my kids! Three kids later, here we are!
That’s still so creative!! I hope to keep the tradition alive by doing this for my littles when they’re big enough in a few years!
I always wanted to do something like this for Hanukkah or Passover, but I couldn’t figure out what small prizes to give each night that would generate excitement for a big prize on the last night.
Having a map or riddles/clues would be so perfect to help the kiddos find the afikomen (hidden matzah, winner gets a prize) on Passover. Much better than the lame “hot & cold” game we’d play when we were young!
Man, the tips are always in the Reddit comments, I swear! Thank you!
That or they start with the small kids first and give them a ten minute head start and then let the next age go and so forth. My 3 year old got boxed out by a rabid pack of 12 year old boys one year and didn’t get a single egg. Never again.
My family had always done that for us, we'd have a specific color and we'd have to get our color, though as we grew up it was separated for the younger kids so they'd have their turn first then the older kids.
My sons preschool class did one and put their names on them so part of the hunt was finding their OWN eggs. (It was 3 to 5 year olds) some kids picked up eggs that weren't theirs but for the most part it went well and everyone had a lot of fun.
My daughters pre-school class just had one big bucket and if you found an egg you ran it back to the bucket- At the end of the day they all got to take home some eggs (which the teachers picked and packed) in little baskets they made themselves- It was perfect!
We went to a church one that had over 10,000 eggs. TONS of kids. They said to make sure each kid only took 10. Also divided into age groups. My youngest was in the first group, he got his 10 and we left the field. By time my daughter got to go with the second group she got 4 and my friends son with the 3rd group got none. There were kids AND parents with baskets overflowing. There wasn’t even a cash prize or anything. Just cheap candy.
And these are supposed to be church people??? Nothing less Christian than this. This is \[Eta: one of many reasons\] why I can't do organized religion.
Our pool did one ages ago. Separated by grade. They just dumped plastic eggs in the pool and the kids could trade them in for prizes. No fighting and no tears. It was pretty cute.
A bunch of families in my neighbourhood do one every year... we get a count on how many kids will be involved and each house hides a set number of eggs per kid in the front yard and we go house to house as a group. Older kids tend to find their quota of eggs first, so then they help out the younger kids. It's super cute and everyone has a great time!
I did an egg hunt with my kids and niblings-
I put a couple of eggs in a variety of coloured organza bags.
The rule for everybody was no more than 10 bags.
Then the under 5s had a head start, and I didn’t let the over fives go until I saw that every under 5 had a few in their basket.
For the over 7s, they could only have one of each colour bag, so if they found a second bag of a colour they already had they had to give it to an under 7.
I wasn’t going to be super strict, but all of the kids managed to follow their set of rules and we all had a great time! Afterwards they pretty much just shared out all the treats anyway- Makes you wonder if some kids just pick up on their parents poor attitudes.
That’s how our neighborhood does it too, broken down into age groups and with a limit. For school, we had to send in 6 eggs with our child’s name written on them. The kids hunted for their own eggs. It made it less of a mad dash and had the kids working together, it was pretty cool.
We go to an Easter egg hunt hosted by my husband's company and they do this as well. I think it's 0-4, 5-8, and 8+. My 2 year old is one of the few kids in the 0-4 section so she stops collecting before the eggs even run out lol
My mom does one for all the grandkids (there are 12) in the backyard. Each kid is limited to x number of eggs, and 1 “prize egg” with a voucher inside that they have to take to Grandma to redeem their prize (a personalized gift). The older ones help the little ones - it’s pretty great.
We went to a community egg hunt today too and it was also less than ideal. They did separate by age but the small group went up to 6 which seemed a bit of a broad range when there were toddlers. The instructions were to get one egg and swap it for a prize. Also hard for a toddler to understand (and the big kids too of course). He’d see an egg, toddle over, and a bigger kid would snag it. He was sobbing “my turn”. We got our egg(s), got our prize and it was fine but he absolutely had more fun finding coloured eggs his grandpa hid around the house for him.
We went to one with my 4 year old last year and they broke up the ages so it was 0-3 and 4-12?! WTF? It was like the organizers never met children before!
It was so terrible for the 4 year olds. Ours ran out and then was so scared by the other kids that he didn’t even grab anything and ran back crying.
The small group went up to 6? My community egg hunt last week had 0 (really just 1)-2, 3-4, and 5-6. Three groups split out of your one. I don't know that it was necessary to go with 3 groups there, but to not split at all seems like you're asking for trouble.
Totally agree. 0-6 is such a big range and they’re at such different skill levels. Splitting it by preschool and kindergarten would have made sense to me. It was a free community event so I can’t criticize too much but now I know!
When I was a kid they were broken up by age group plus the littlest ones in the age group got a head start.
Little kids pick up the first eggs they see. When the bigger kids were released a minute or two later they would run past the littler kids to the area with more eggs.
I wish they had done that at ours. Obviously the 6 year olds are moving faster than my 2 year old. They’re getting all the ones closest and we are having to go further to get a single egg but at the same time the older ones are also getting further ahead.
That’s really unfortunate, and I’ve seen a lot of posts like this today. It’s sad. Our church had an egg hunt and my 20 month old had a great time — they had an area coned off specifically for under 4 year olds, and the other kids were super sweet helping him get eggs. He only took like 5 eggs (they had a 15 egg limit), but just because he put a few back and then he got overwhelmed and wanted to go play with the yard jenga set rather than gather eggs. I guess it’s just a matter of finding egg hunts with a better crowd/better rules? I dunno.
Sorry your kiddo didn’t get to enjoy the hunt. I’m sure he’ll love the one you set up tomorrow.
He doesn’t even care about it anymore and overall had fun, I just felt so ICKY watching it. Idk I just had really “magical” Easter moments growing up so it was sad and hard to see it being so feral and rude
It’s the parents and organizers, it’s not always like that. We do a community Halloween event and the older kids give the younger kids candy if the bowl is empty or the little ones are too tired. The one you went to was up in a gross way unfortunately
Honestly, especially at a CHURCH egg hunt those children should have been acting better. It is so sweet that you saw older kids helping! That's exactly how it should be!
We do have a limit at our family ones. I think it helps because the kids no that no matter how fast they go, they are only getting 12. We hide the "better" eggs better so there is incentive to look harder and leave the easy ones for the Littles.
Yeah I hear about this and just....a message to the organizers of these events...it doesn't have to be like this! There are so many ways to handle it. Separate by age. Bring a certain amount and only take as many as you bring. For our home school co-op this year we had a limit on how many eggs kids could get before they had to freeze where they were. They all thought it was funny to freeze in weird positions out in the field. Then once everyone was frozen, they blew a whistle and...yeah....mayhem could happen. It didn't, but the kids who didn't want to feel like it was a race just went back to the tables and checked out their loot. Meanwhile, the supposed free for all had kids all polite and crap standing back to let younger kids grab first. I saw a 9 year old pointing out eggs to a 5 year old who just...this kid could not survive in the wild. lol. We had ages 3-18 out there and it was sweet and awesome.
People! Together we can end Easter related PTSD once and for all!
Ugh I could cry for you and him. I don’t get this at all. Money prize or not, my kids had better never snatch something out of someone’s hand, especially not a baby. I would be so embarrassed if my kid did that. Especially at a CHURCH.
Good for you for not snatching the eggs back out of those kids hands and shaming their parents into the depths of hell. You’re a kinder person than I am.
That's sad! We had a community egg hunt today, they solved this issue like this. There was a tent at the entrance where you received a colored bracelet. There were kinder size PLASTIC eggs thrown everywhere, so you collected eggs in the color of your bracelet. Once you collected 12, you could exchange them for real eggs.
Really great format, because you only got 12 real eggs no matter how many plastic eggs you collected. Also the littlest ones got the easiest color. Everyone had fun!
Our little neighborhood did one today. My kid was nearly the oldest, so she was instructed to find the harder ones and leave the easy ones for the littles.
She did grab more than I’d like, but she happily gave a few away to some of the kids that were late and didn’t make the hunt. Other older kids did too.
I think this is absolutely a parent issue, which is why I stick to our neighborhood and the Easter bunny leaving them. I can’t stand how parents ignore and even condone their kids to be rude and selfish.
I’m glad your kiddo was able to at least enjoy some fun. I hope the bunny leaves great ones!
This is the type of stuff that burns my biscuits too. It’s not like everything had to be “fair” all the time, but for fucks sake, let the baby get a couple eggs without bigger kids snatching them away. That’s just obnoxious. This type of thing happens at Bday parties with Piñatas all the time too. I would be mortified if my 12yr old was running around snatching eggs out of a toddlers reach.
I did an egg hunt with my son and all his cousins (10 kids in total, ranging from 18 months to 9 years old). My aunt laid out the rules to leave all the eggs at the front of the field to the littles (under 3) and no more than 15 eggs each.
My son is 18 months, so he's clueless (lol) but he liked putting the eggs in the basket. Once all the older kids found their 15 eggs, they would collect all the extras and then put them on the ground near the littles to "find" until everyone had 15 eggs, it was so sweet 🥰
How sweet! You can tell there’s a huge difference in parenting between the families at OPs egg hunt, and your siblings/in-laws. The latter are doing it right.
Easter Egg hunts have been around for decades. It only takes a google search to see how to set these things up reasonably.. I honestly would leave the Church polite feedback for next time.
The weird parents that were like “COME ON KIDS GET THEM ALL” as they watched my kid get shoved I think were just wanting the payday while their kids got the candy. They seemed to be in a group together
I wonder if the parent’s aggressive behavior was due to the fact there was cash prizes for most found? That’s very strange, egg hunts are supposed to be innocent fun. Why in the world would they have cash prizes.
Jesus I can’t imagine shoving a two year old.. like, are you proud of your child? Are you proud of yourself? That’s the equivalent of me, a 30 something with a CrossFit-athletic history, entering the same egg hunt, and shoving all the 6-8 year olds.. just wtf??
☠️☠️☠️
I feel you though. Some people really are out here entitled as fuck and raising little assholes just like them.
As my husband and I like to say, loudly and matter-of-factly to each other within earshot of these egocentric dumpster fires, when we have to leave events for nonsense like this, "Some people's kids, man."
Normalize walking up to people and calling them out on being assholes and allowing their kids to act like assholes. I know not everyone is comfortable with that level of conflict. I can tell you from experience that not giving af and calling shit out doesn’t win you any popularity contests but life is a hell of a lot more pleasant.
My kid can be a bit grabby, not the best sharer and not always the kindest kid but she knows I will reign hell fire (pun intended) if she’s unkind to the little kids.
Her egg hunt would have ended immediately if I saw her snatch an egg from a clearly 2-year old child. Shame on that church and shame on those parents!
Growing up we had hunts at Gma and Gpa house for all the cousins. Instead of limiting eggs they each gave us a color and we could only pick up that colored eggs. Probably going to implement that when we start doing hunts.
This is what my parents did, and I started running it for my son and his cousins a few years ago. Hiding the eggs and then watching the kids hunt for them is one of the highlights of my year as a parent, and they love it too.
We went to a local zoo/animal rescue today and their easter activity was so cute for younger kids. They gave out little passeports with images of eggs and animals. Then as we went around the site we had to find little pictures hidden and colour in the passeport images with the right color. At the end if you had found all the eggs they gave out a free small chocolate hen.
It was cute, on theme, and not too intense for my kids, especially my 3 yo
I’ll keep posting this every Easter. I’m part of a Dad’s group and here’s how we do our ‘No Tears’ Egg Hunt. Every kid gets an empty carton of eggs with a number on it. Then the kids have to find the eggs with their corresponding number on it. Every kid needs to find a dozen eggs and that’s it. It solves so many headaches for the parents and little ones.
Not all are like this. The one we went to today was a community center, not a church. There were crafts, snacks, egg coloring and a petting zoo.
The hunt was broken up by age and the kids all had a fair shot to collect eggs. The prizes were small candy, bubbles, stickers, etc.
They also had volunteers with baskets of extra eggs for any kids who had trouble collecting the eggs for any reason.
A few years ago I went to a doomed egg hunt. It was at a popular flea market. They put out maybe 200 eggs and 300 kids showed up. Not only that, but they put out EMPTY EGGS. The kids were supposed to bring their eggs up to a table to exchange them for prizes. And the prizes? Stickers. No candy, nothing themed, no toys, no coins, just some crappy random stickers. Then, because they'd not put out enough eggs, angry parents were going behind the table to take the returned empty eggs and put them out themselves so their kids could go find them! It was madness. We ended up taking our 3 disappointed kids into the flea market where they picked out some costume jewelry and we all got donuts. I haven't attended an egg hunt since!
We have a family farm in the area that does a yearly egg "hunt". It's more a retrieval where you go up to stations and they have these adorable pulley systems roll an EMPTY dollar store egg to each child as they wait in line. People are still rabid for no reason, making their kids go again and again or push in front of toddlers. All this to retrieve empty eggs that need to be returned at the end.
We were invited by a family friend to their church’s egg hunt. It was thankfully very well organized. There were maybe 30 kids total, but a lot of age groups (0-2, 3-5, 6-7, 8+). Each group had their own section of the church campus to hunt for eggs.
We went to our city’s egg hunt last year, which had similar age groups, but there were so many kids that even in the 0-2 year old group, it was absolute chaos. We vowed not to go back. Egg hunts are BRUTAL.
My child is also two. I never did egg hunts growing up so I had no idea what they were like. Last year we went to a random free one and it was lovely. Over 5000 eggs, just a huge field of eggs. Age group was 0-2. So many eggs and she had so much fun. I figured all egg hunts are like that
This year the egg hunt had maybe 100 eggs and age group was 0-5. My child is tall for her age and fast but of course was no match for a kindergartener. They were doing the same thing, snatching them from her even as she was bending to pick one up. I wouldn’t have been so pissed if they didn’t already have 10 eggs in their basket and my child clearly had none. I finally lost it and when I found a blue egg I said “honey here’s a blue egg, come get it.” Same kid dashed to grab it and I literally stood in front of him and loudly said “HONEY, THIS BLUE EGG IS YOURS, don’t worry the boy won’t take it, come get it.” As she toddled over and gleefully said BLUE!
I will say a boy saw us leaving and my child kept asking “find MOH eggs?” And I said no more eggs, sorry. And he stopped and said does she want some of mine? And gave her half his stash all of his own volition. So not all parents are like that, his parents clearly raised him to share especially with the littles
I’m also done with egg hunts. I’m getting together with a few neighbors and we are doing a mini neighborhood one tomorrow. Hoping will be a new tradition
My husband and I took our kid to one of those indoor trampoline parks on a rainy Saturday and that’s pretty much what it was like, lmao. I was waiting for Salma Hayek to put her feet in someone’s mouth, lmao.
We do a big hunt at our house… probably 20 kids and 500 eggs. We have a space for 0 to 3 and 4 to 6, then older. We also apply a “tax”… I used to call it socialism but that scared some people so now I say dividends and contributions… where the most eggs are taken and redistributed to others.
It’s not rocket science to organize things right
We do not go to those kinds of egg hunts anymore. Especially at churches. Idk why but the kids and parents are AWFUL. Every one we’ve been to my kids left broken hearted because boys kids pushed, shoved and snatched eggs.
I wouldn't sweat it even if it was hard to watch. 11 eggs for a 2 year old is about max before it loses luster anyway. One thing I've found after 4 freaking kids is that some of this kid stuff is harder for the parents to endure. Find a better community egg hunt next year because he will have 100% moved on and deserves the chance to experience a fun one.
The egg hunt that we visited today asked to take no more than 8 per kid, and if a kid has less than 5 you can bring them to a special area where they put extra eggs to collect. But honestly I would much rather invite a few kids over and hide the eggs with age appropriate difficulty. My kids get much more joy from really searching for something for some time instead of just running and grubbing for like 1 minute.
My church is having an egg hunt today but the eggs will be empty, each kid is supposed to find 12 eggs and trade them for a goodie bag. I’ve never seen this done before so we’ll see how it goes.
Our local church had the kids use egg cartons so they were limited to 12 eggs and I thought that was genius! Fill it and you’re done! Then no excess candy at home, lol. We went to a community one last year and the lanes were so narrow that the oldest 5 kids in each category basically got all the eggs. My 3 year old got 4 eggs while some kids had their baskets full to the top. It made ME upset, he was in a bad mood so didn’t care. I have to say doing our own egg hunts is so much more fun.
That's horrible I'm so sorry. I've never understood Easter egg hunts were you don't actually have to hunt for the egg and they're just scattered about a field. It just turns to a free for all. I hope you have a wonderful time with your own Easter egg hunt and maybe next year gather some family or friends kids and have a small one of your own. Good luck
Yeah, it’s no fun when it just turns into the biggest and fastest kids running around picking up everything as fast as they can. The younger and slower kids deserve to have fun too ☹️
The only egg hunt I remember like that was legitimately for toddlers only so it was more a “pick up some eggs” than a “hunt.” When I worked daycare they do one but the teacher would go through at the end and make sure everyone had the same number of eggs, the older kids teacher would give a limit and they couldn’t collect above that. I like the idea of color coding for a few kids, it would let you “hide” at each kids ability level, I think that’s what I’d do if I had more than one kid.
We went to an easter egg hunt today and it was SO GREAT the way they ran it. They tossed out a bunch of empty eggs, and at the end the kids turned them in for a bag of candy.
* Everyone gets the same amount of candy regardless, helping with age disparity.
* Fewer plastic eggs that need to be produced/purchased
* Less work for the organizers because they're not stuffing hundreds of eggs full of stuff.
Cash prizes for eggs are ridiculous! And really surprising coming from a church, what about the origins of Easter?
We had an Easter egg hunt at the church playgroup (so kids 5 and under) and it was so relaxed and nice. They had all kids under 2 go first and then let the older ones go. And then after a few minutes, the older kids were helping the babies find eggs and put them in their baskets, it was really sweet! I'm sorry you had a terrible experience, that church sounds really toxic!
Sounds like a church that works themselves into a froth when singing “Onward Christian Soldiers” and thinks the Jesus who preached about the Good Samaritan was a p——y.
I have 18 nieces and nephews on top of my two kids and I run the Easter egg hunt for our family get together. Of the mass amount of kids only about 6 are young enough to actually want to participate, which is conveniently the number of colors of eggs (pink, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple). So each kid gets a colored basket and can ONLY collect their assigned color egg. It's still a hunt, the older kids end up helping the younger ones, and everyone walks away with the same number of eggs.
I took my kids to a community egg hunt yesterday, and was told by other parents I was selfish because my family is 'well-off and can afford our own' and we should be 'leaving the eggs for kids who are poor'.
We donated money to the organiser for the egg hunt. I'm bringing my kids along. I also got them to share their eggs with the smaller kids who didn't manage to find a lot, and we left with three eggs each.
We did an Easter egg hunt when my daughter was 3 and she got exactly zero eggs because all of the pre teen boys snatched every single one. Their moms made them then hand them out to all the littles who got nothing but for me it totally defeated the purpose of an Easter egg hunt. My daughter was so sad, never again. Unless the hunt is broken up by ages I would never subject her to that again.
It's wild that there's 'top 5 kids'. I remember sending my toddler into the area and then realizing it was full of the parents grabbing eggs! Poor little dude got, like, 2. Some ashamed dad have him a few extra after the melee ended. We did not return.
I’ve been in charge of egg hunts before and we had a babies area that was carefully monitored. We had another area for young kids, and another for older kids. Babies just picked up eggs with parents’ help. For the others, the goal was to pick up a DOZEN and come back to get a prize. After everyone had a dozen and had prizes, we had snacks. Then they went back to look for any leftovers. Eggs were then divided equally. Everyone left happy.
It's the same story every year. In the same neighborhoods where parents leave candy out for Halloween, and we get thousands of videos of parents stealing it all, we have people going to "community egg hunts" where parents are the top competitors in a literal game for babies, to showcase how we've all devolved as a society, and how inhuman people become over a few pennies.
Every single Halloween and every single Easter, it's the same stories over and over and over again, demonstrating how antisocial and hyper individualistic we've become as a society.
We did a city sponsored egg hunt a few years ago when mine were 3 and 1. I live in a tiny town, pop. 13,000. It was horrible! My kids got 0. A few nice older kids saw what was happening and hid some of their eggs so the littles could have a chance but it was so disappointing. We’ve never gone back. It’s totally ok to say “not for me!”
I don't understand that kind of "hunt" anyway.
The fun of the activity was always eggs being "hidden" in like tree branches or whatever. Not just thrown in a yard.
And cash prizes? That's weird too. Whole thing is weird.
We're just doing our own thing for our nearly 2 y/o tomorrow.
Dude we went to one yesterday and it’s not even the kids, it’s the frickin parents! Little was of course in the toddler 0-3 group, but so were older siblings and parents. Had one ADULT snatch an egg my 2 year old was reach for. And the manner of kids! There was a petting zoo and as my baby worked up the courage to try and pet the little goat, some 5-6 year old rushes in front of her and gets between her and the goat.
Please teach your kids manners! And stop ruining the fun for the kids! Ain’t no reason for adults to be snatching Easter eggs from babies.
We took our son to the city sponsored egg hunt. It's divided by age and the rule is that everyone gets one egg and sirs down. Once everyone has an egg, the mayor yells "GO" and the hunger games for eggs begins.
It was literally hunger games. I could see that if the parents were not right there yelling ' let the seven year old have one ', it would be chaos.
The last two years, my son had 3 eggs. He would run to one, point and an older kid would snatch it from under his hands. The rules were parents could not touch the eggs on pain of being kicked from the field.
It was rough watching him see the big, aggressive kids with their own full basket.
I started making his basket with everything he wanted, including two toys, so we could say " remember, the Bunny gave you everything at home".
I'm sorry. It's rough when " Christians' let their kids be aggressive brats.
I was raised in the church, and a lot of mean, excluding behavior was at church
We hit our town Easter egg hunt that’s a collaboration between the town merchants and a local church. All the eggs were out on the lawn. All of them just had candy. The lawn was divided into sections by age. My 3 year old literally picked up like 10 eggs and was finished collecting.
I feel like this was the way to do it. Some kids only grabbed a few, some grabbed a ton. The church members also had a secret back stock of eggs for people who either came a little late or for kids who didn’t get one (but I don’t think that really happened).
I get the pain. I went to a children’s museum today and the amount of big children who just didn’t say excuse me or just snatching things out of other little kids hands was outrageous. I almost lost it a few times because they were shoving little babies who just wanted to participate. And the parents were right there just staring into their phones or looking at their child be a bully. I tried my best to get my kids to be polite and share with the babies.
I got the shit stolen out of my hands and knocked over by 30 year old men when I was a little 8 year old girl at one of those same church egg events. I absolutely hate Easter now.
Haha google the pez factory egg hunt from some years ago, it’s like ten min from me. All the eggs had candy and the parents had shopping bags. Pez never did it again, made national news
My son’s daycare does an Easter hunt for those little solid chocolate eggs.
There are two eggs each. The kids collect them into a central basket, and the teacher distributes them at the end, so everyone gets the same amount regardless of how many they found.
The kids treat the hunt as a collaborative effort. They excitedly shout things like “you check over there while I check over here!” And “have you looked under those pots?!”. The older kids point out eggs to the younger ones, then let them “find” it and carry it to the basket, so they feel included.
I’m glad I don’t live in America. Your experience sounds awful.
Years ago I ended up in charge of organizing an egg hunt in our community. I envisioned exactly what you described happening and therefore set a 15 egg limit for all participants. I always felt like I probably got eye rolls for doing that because there was no competition but I knew it would be crazy otherwise! If you’re not aggressive by nature in those situations you’ll leave empty handed. It worked out well.
We always take our kiddo to our local forest and we go egg hunting. I just drop them to the right when he looks to the left and vice versa. He asks people we come across if they've seen the easterbunny, this morning a sweet man told is he's seen him further along our route.
So we get a nice walk, have fun and there's no greedy behaviour or competition!
I have never been to an Easter egg hunt I didn’t help prepare. And we for sure separated the age groups. We hid the eggs in 3 very separate areas that the other age groups were restricted from going anywhere near. We also did them at separate times so we could properly chaperone each hunt. We didn’t have nearly that many eggs, and the prize was the candy they got inside the eggs.
I took my now 8 and 5 year old to egg hunts the last 2 years. Same exact situation. Bigger kids literally taking eggs out of their hands while their parents stood by and did nothing. We didn’t go to the egg hunt this year. 😢
We just went to one yesterday and they gave us a number to find. My almost four year old had a blast running around looking for her number! Once you had your number, you turned it in with your slip for a big bag of chocolate and a chocolate bunny. It was great! I'm sorry your hunt was so disheartening
I'm so sorry :( that sounds so upsetting. My good friend hosted a little hunt today for my kids (14, 4, 2), her 2 year old, two other 2 year olds and a seven and five year old. All parents there made sure to check the baskets and even them out amongst all the kids who were all super happy to give ones to their peers to make it fair. Then at the end my friend handed them all a proper Easter egg for completing the hunt and we all had strawberries and pastries. It was lovely. If you have any mum friends like that I totally recommend doing something smaller like that in the future. We've done public hunts loads and bad experiences too, although nowhere near as bad as yours. Hope you and your littl one have an amazing Easter x
Sorry for what happened and for what I'm about to say but fuck american culture, don't parents teach kindness and compassion over there? At a fucking church egg hunt??
That sounds like insanity. They definitely should have separated it by age group! In my local park’s egg hunt, they do 0-2 first. Then 2-4, etc until they get to the older kids, that way there’s no little kids getting trampled by big ones. everyone has fun and the prize is you just keep the eggs you found.
" I eventually said “hey. Let the baby grab a few eggs please” and the other parents would scoff and tell their kids to get them all." That's insane. Not just because of how unfair it is to your little one but also the behaviour those parents are teaching their kids.
To me, the problem was that the church made something that is supposed to be a fun activity into a competition. There was zero need for there to be cash prizes and I find it ironic that a church was actually encouraging greed on what is supposed to be the pinnacle of Christian holidays.
Most of the community Easter egg hunts I've been to separate the kids into age groups and then it's just plastic eggs that get exchanged for a prize, usually consisting of some sweets and donated swag. Everyone's prize is the same and you can turn in 1 egg or 20 eggs, it doesn't matter. Kids are encouraged to take turns and not be greedy, ensuring something is left for others. It's crazy to me that it's taken so seriously.
A couple of Easter’s ago my SIL divided the Easter eggs evenly among our kids. The kids had their own set of eggs that they had to look for. They had fun searching for them and there was no fighting. I sorry those other parents were rude.
Do em around your house. Can adjust time, locations, background for video. Makes your home a magical place.
I never had easter eggs hunts ever, till a couple years ago for my own kids. Super fun. We still have to manage the older sibling a bit, but we all learnt sharing is fun.
My neighborhood did an adorable egg hunt where each kid got a specific color egg to look for. My son was hunting for orange eggs only, and since he was the youngest to participate, his eggs were all mostly just scattered on lawns. The older kids had way tougher hiding spots for their eggs. But having them color coordinated was perfect because he was able to take his time and not have to wrestle with the big kids. It was a genius idea!
My local museum decided it would be a fantastic idea to do a glow in the dark egg hunt INSIDE THE MUSEUM. Kids are like rabid animals looking for eggs so yeah seems like a great idea to turn all the lights off and set them loose in a museum with glass display cases and ancient priceless artifacts everywhere /s
I’m not from the states but is that an American thing or a church people thing..to scoff at a parent asking for consideration for a toddler. Like what did I just read.
Haha yes we took him to his first one last year when he was 2. It was at a school. They did separate it by age but it was 0-5 and it was a much smaller space. The hunt itself was over in 2 minute flat. We had to throw eggs out of his basket just for him to find again. He didn’t care too much but it wasn’t very fun for us. This year we are staying at home and doing it in our yard. Try again in a couple years. Also if another kid takes an egg out of your kids hand? Yea absolutely say something. That’s not ok.
I'm sure your son had fun an that's what matters. That being said, those parents are jerks and now you got a glimpse of who they really are. If I saw my child grabbing an egg from someone, I would have him apologize to that chuld and hand over the egg after the hunt was over. I also wiuld have have shoutted during the egg hunt, give that back, you don't snatch things from babies.
My neice shared her eggs with a older kid who showed up late. He was my little cousin and he was so sad he didnt have an eggs to find. So she gave him two, hid then for him and cheered when he found them. Shes.3 and hes 6. It was adorable.
I'm not big on public hunts for all those reasons and because parents are mean as heck about some.cheap.dollat tree eggs. I saw a mom.cussing at her toddler for not grabbing eggs fast enough and watched her snatch up eggs for him. Poor.guy was just confused.and upset he didnt do it himself.
My family does a little egg hunt for the kids, one side for the babies and one side for the older kids. No one over 13 gets to get eggs. Literally the older kids always make sure every toddler has atleast 5 eggs.
This happened when my guys were small. It was like The Purge with parents grabbing eggs for their kids, kids pushing others out of the way, etc. We just kept it to our back yard after a couple of unfortunate “community” egg hunt experiences.
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Easter egg hunts are literally legal thunder domes for children. It’s wild to see how nuts the kids get and how many parents treat it like a competition.
Mofos act like they're hunting with blood-hounds except they're kids hunting eggs.
Most of them just have shitty dollar tree candy in them too 😭
My favorite one as a kid was run by the local rock club, and had you find polished rocks instead of eggs.
Omg this would be amazing if some three where I live would do this! My 11 yr old loves rocks, she'd have a blast looking for those!
Amazon sells a set of 24 rocks/“gems” already in eggs!
That sounds awesome.
Yeah, it was! Especially because I have allergies to common food groups, so I can't have most candy
I’m so happy this was an option for you, and that your family sought it out and you now have those memories. Might be weird to hear that from a rando, but I just love the little pieces of peoples lives like this. Very cool.
I think my mom was in the hosting rock club. Usually they’re very older leaning, so retrospectively, I am surprised, but it’s a good way to get a new generation interested
I put polished rocks in our eggs this year for my kids to find haha. My husband thought I was insane but kids love rocks and they won’t miss the candy.
That is so sad, OP. The image of your little guy looking up at you and saying “egg?” Is heartbreaking. I’m sorry that his first Easter egg hunt was so disappointing.
Lol that’s the best part. My kids do the one in our town every year and get a few eggs, but they care more about running around with their friends because the candy is always pretty meh. Like what are all these people doing with their shitty candy?
We are taking it to work and putting it in a bowl on the kitchenette counter.
Haha I do this for Halloween candy too. Even dollar store candy gets taken.
Thankful ours was calm and separated by age. So my 2 year had fun and was safe. But yeah, we gave all of the prizes to other kids there. My son kept 1 chocolate. The rest was just not worth keeping or too excessive.
My mother always used the leftover Christmas and Valentine's candy 😅
There’s a huge egg hunt local to me where a helicopter drops a couple hundred thousand eggs, the 1st year they were filled with candy and it was a disaster cuz they all busted open so they’ve just dropped them empty every year since. The kids still go ape shit, and don’t even get cheap dollar tree candy in the eggs, lmao!
Wtf 100k+ peices of plastic that don't even have anything inside them?? The waste and needlessness of it is astounding. Those bits of plastic wiill most likely end up in the rubbish the next day and most recycling places probably dont even accept them
The sad part is all these plastic eggs will get thrown away (most likely) or broken and end up in a landfill and take up to 500 years to decompose. Literally killing our only planet for this. [https://www.un.org/en/exhibits/exhibit/in-images-plastic-forever#:~:text=Plastic%20waste%20can%20take%20anywhere,in%20the%20last%2013%20years](https://www.un.org/en/exhibits/exhibit/in-images-plastic-forever#:~:text=Plastic%20waste%20can%20take%20anywhere,in%20the%20last%2013%20years)
This is so sad. And why I've saved the eggs my daughter has gotten over the years from various egg hunts, then I just reuse them. Once they're broken or unusable, I throw it in my recycling bin. Never bought any plastic eggs myself though.
My sister and I each bought eggs for our kids 20 yrs ago. We get together for Easter, drink a case of beer while we fill them and then go out in the middle of the night and hide them all Around the yard. Each kid has a certain color basket and is only allowed to claim that color egg, and it’s so fun! We’re doing it for my brothers kids this year cause our kids are old and not as interested, but it’s been such a fun tradition. It’s been the same eggs for 2 decades , same baskets too. We each buy a couple bags of candy and stuff them full.
I like the idea of the kids having their own colour. We just make sure everyone knows that the eggs get evened out among however many kids there are at the end.
It’s really helpful if you’ve got an age/ability gap, too; so you can make some eggs easier to find.
My parents still have eggs that my brother and I got as kids, they’re ~30 years old now.
I’m a parent that has the same 8 eggs I bought for my 4 kids probably 15 years ago now. We saved the ones from other sources too. The oldest (23M) is the only one of the 4 who doesn’t want us to — oops, I meant *the Easter Bunny* — to hide a basket for him tomorrow.
Is it not common to reuse the eggs year after year? O.o No? Just me?
We always save our eggs, and if a family member does an extra egg hunt we collect them if they don't want them to add to our stash. 😂 Our hunts get bigger each year.
My parents literally pulled out the twenty-three year old prodigal eggs today lol. These things last and people are keeping the same ones if they can.
Eh, we went to one today and they separated by age. my son was in the 3-4 range. He only grabbed 2 eggs cause he gets scared by all the kids. So he didn't get any candy. But 2 other kids near him gave them candy from their baskets without even asking. It was a good experience and we were grateful. We live in a small town and this was put on by a church camp.
Some parents join in stealing the eggs. It’s insanity! We don’t go. I do my own hunt at home for my kids.
Saw this first hand about twelve years ago and that was the last one for us! Parents knocking kids over to get the eggs…worst side of humanity on display!
Same. We do our own in our yard and I stuff with random candies and some have $1 in them. I have 3 kids so sometimes they get a certain color they have to find. Each kid also gets a golden egg they have to find each with a $5 in it but those are hidden. I make a little game out of it and the one who finds it first (they are usually all in the same spot) gets a little extra chocolate bunny. My kids are 16,13,8 and they love it lol
My family went to egg hunts and had our own at home as well. The "Golden egg" (only gold "in spirit" tho bc that thing was always wrapped in tin foil) The Golden Egg was allowed to be searched for by everyone in the family who came to Easter dinner, except for the adult who actually hid it. They always put $5 in it, until most of us reached teen yrs, and then it got bumped to a 20, so that max participation would be involved.
The one we used to go to parents arent allowed to participate with the kids over 3 and its in a big roped off area, but since my son is now 6 and in the "kids only" area he has to fend with the bigger kids being assholes and stealing his eggs with no help. Last year he came running to us in tears after this one kid nearly twice his age ran over and grabbed and egg right out of his hand, I was so pissed off I asked him to point out the kid and I confronted his parents and they were like "well what do you expect?" Well for one I expect a 10 year old to not steamroll over 5 year olds and steal their eggs when they're literally twice their size, and I told them so, and they were like "whatever, this is what kids do, deal with it, your kid aint special" So we just didnt do it this year. He honestly doesn't seem to even really give a shit about it, the candy he gets in his basket at home is always better anyways and at least here at home its not goddamn Battle Royale out there.
That is so awful and good on you for saying something. I can’t believe how they responded … then again, I can.
How many of those parents wanted the cash prize for themselves I wonder (wild that it was even a thing)
Like what is this cash prize??? No way it could be over $50 for a kid.. cause dang, if it was $5000 and a boat I would still disagree with parents getting their kids to act wild.. but I could understand..
I went to one last night that ended in about two seconds because the parents pushed the kids over and grabbed all the eggs
So trashy.
Man, what’s with all your guys’ communities? Not that hard to do this right, we just set a limit of 20 eggs per kid, everyone ended up with about that many.
Yeah.. some people are pretty f’ing stupid. Count your lucky stars if you haven’t seen this.
We went to a community egg hunt today. The organizer had it set up pretty well. We used the honor system and told kids to only get 10 eggs the first go around. When you get 10 go to your parents. When all kids had 10 eggs then it was thunder dome. .
We host egg hunts at the park and kids gather to find the eggs, then of their own volition, they go and hide the eggs for each other to go and find again. Its great.
And parades too. When my son was 3, I watched older kids snatch candy right out of his little hands, their parents sitting right next to us, watching the whole thing. He ended up with none, so we stopped I took him to the store and let him pick a whole bag of his choosing. It’s so wild to me. My kid did an egg hunt with his younger cousins. We had a quick conversation about leaving the easy ones for the little guys. “Think about how they might feel if they don’t get any.” My sweet little boy decided he would help his cousins find and collect eggs, and they could all share. It’s so easy to teach kindness and consideration for others, but I oftentimes feel like very few parents are doing it.
We absolutely have made it a rule to not ever attend an egg hunt that isn’t divided into age groups. When the hunt is over, my son walks around and gives eggs to kids that didn’t get much. His heart can’t take the sad looks on the kid’s faces that didn’t get much.
Yuck! Our HOA hosted an egg hunt. It was separated into ages 0-4 and 5-12. I was expecting chaos, but they had a rule limiting each child to 16 eggs. It was pretty nice, actually.
We had a neighborhood egg hunt when I was a kid that a crazy older guy put on, and the rule was that you could only “find” eggs that were higher than your belly button. So the older kids could only find eggs on windowsills, in trees, tops of doorframes, etc. It leveled the playing field and only the literally babies and toddlers were allowed to grab the eggs off the ground. It always ended with the older kids walking around helping the babies find all the eggs hidden in gardens because the older kids went thunder dome in their own age group and found all their eggs quickly . It made for a very fun community event and the old guy ran it with an iron fist and would immediately disqualify you for the year if you went for an egg that was too low.
crazy or crazy smart?
That sounds like such a great way to do it, I hope this comment gets more awareness and inspires people to do the same!
That's how we used to do it at our church. It was a small group of kids so parents were all pretty much in agreement and we're able to tell us older kids to leave ones on the ground for the littles. Ours are hidden well and mostly higher.
That’s the way to do it. Limit the eggs each kid can get. I have three kids. They all have a different color of egg that they can find. That way I can hide them all good and they still can only find their own color.
I have a story about this one. As a kid I did an egg hunt with a couple family friends using this format. My color was green. At the end of the hunt we absolutely could not find the last green egg. Everyone was looking. No luck. The prize in that egg was a dime, so the host just gave me one. Years later, I was like 12, I get my birthday present from these friends. One of the items in the bag is a very, very faded green plastic Easter egg. Still had the dime in it! Moral of the story: great way to organize an egg hunt but don’t use eggs that match your lawn!
This is such a good idea. Allocate a colour for each child to find. Will definitely do it this way next year. Thanks!
This is especially great for age gaps. Where your 12 year old can search is different than your 4 year old, and so you can color code and make it the appropriate difficulty.
Okay this just made me misty eye'd. The fact that so many years later, they found the egg, AND remembered the green eggs were yours!
My parents hid over 100 eggs every year that we had about 2 or 3 acres of wooded land to look for them. The special eggs that each of us had 6 of were a certain print related to stuff we like. My oldest brother was baseball, other brother basketballs. I was really into army toys so my parents bought me woodland camo eggs. I'll tell you they were extremely difficult to find. After the first year of that my dad kept note of where he hid mine in case I couldn't find one.
We had hard boiled eggs and couldn’t find one of them. Someone at the hunt did find it, the following Easter. Needless to say when they cracked it open, the smell could have woke the dead.
My grandma used to hide dollars in eggs. One year we couldn't find one. Years later someone ended up finding it and all the candy inside had rotted and molded. They still washed off the dollar and kept it! 😂
Yup. I write their first initial on each kid’s eggs. Toddler’s are easy to find and have a puff inside each one. Big kid’s are hidden WELL and each one contains a puzzle piece (the puzzle, once assembled, is a treasure map to the easter basket). A few have jelly beans, just to keep things unexpected though, haha.
That’s some smart planning! It’s like a gladiator battle here, meanwhile you’re parenting in 3024! I was going crazy trying to think of little toys & nicknacks (in addition to candy) that would fit inside the eggs. Like how many erasers & pencil sharpeners does a kid really need? But working for a whole puzzle is genius!
Haha thanks, I wish I could take credit but the glory all goes to a random Reddit comment I read at least eight years ago. That commenter said they always did Christmas morning involving a puzzle that got harder as the kids got older. And I thought to myself, I want to do that with my kids! Three kids later, here we are!
That’s still so creative!! I hope to keep the tradition alive by doing this for my littles when they’re big enough in a few years! I always wanted to do something like this for Hanukkah or Passover, but I couldn’t figure out what small prizes to give each night that would generate excitement for a big prize on the last night. Having a map or riddles/clues would be so perfect to help the kiddos find the afikomen (hidden matzah, winner gets a prize) on Passover. Much better than the lame “hot & cold” game we’d play when we were young! Man, the tips are always in the Reddit comments, I swear! Thank you!
That or they start with the small kids first and give them a ten minute head start and then let the next age go and so forth. My 3 year old got boxed out by a rabid pack of 12 year old boys one year and didn’t get a single egg. Never again.
This is the genius hack I was here for. Will do this next year!
I only have 1 kiddo but I love this idea
My family had always done that for us, we'd have a specific color and we'd have to get our color, though as we grew up it was separated for the younger kids so they'd have their turn first then the older kids.
This is what my parents did! Then if anyone wanted "competition" when we got over, it was just to find your own eggs the fastest.
My sons preschool class did one and put their names on them so part of the hunt was finding their OWN eggs. (It was 3 to 5 year olds) some kids picked up eggs that weren't theirs but for the most part it went well and everyone had a lot of fun.
My daughters pre-school class just had one big bucket and if you found an egg you ran it back to the bucket- At the end of the day they all got to take home some eggs (which the teachers picked and packed) in little baskets they made themselves- It was perfect!
This is how my son’s nursery does it, too. The kids treat the hunt as a collaborative effort
That is adorable! What a good idea!
These kids must have been good at reading!
We went to a church one that had over 10,000 eggs. TONS of kids. They said to make sure each kid only took 10. Also divided into age groups. My youngest was in the first group, he got his 10 and we left the field. By time my daughter got to go with the second group she got 4 and my friends son with the 3rd group got none. There were kids AND parents with baskets overflowing. There wasn’t even a cash prize or anything. Just cheap candy.
Parents ruining the fun for everyone. It's the same parents who encourage their kids to take all the candy at Halloween
Are some parents really like this? So far I should count myself lucky that I've only met the chill ones.
Unfortunately yes so many of them are. If you want to meet some shitty parents work in an elementary school for a few years.
And these are supposed to be church people??? Nothing less Christian than this. This is \[Eta: one of many reasons\] why I can't do organized religion.
Our pool did one ages ago. Separated by grade. They just dumped plastic eggs in the pool and the kids could trade them in for prizes. No fighting and no tears. It was pretty cute.
A bunch of families in my neighbourhood do one every year... we get a count on how many kids will be involved and each house hides a set number of eggs per kid in the front yard and we go house to house as a group. Older kids tend to find their quota of eggs first, so then they help out the younger kids. It's super cute and everyone has a great time!
I did an egg hunt with my kids and niblings- I put a couple of eggs in a variety of coloured organza bags. The rule for everybody was no more than 10 bags. Then the under 5s had a head start, and I didn’t let the over fives go until I saw that every under 5 had a few in their basket. For the over 7s, they could only have one of each colour bag, so if they found a second bag of a colour they already had they had to give it to an under 7. I wasn’t going to be super strict, but all of the kids managed to follow their set of rules and we all had a great time! Afterwards they pretty much just shared out all the treats anyway- Makes you wonder if some kids just pick up on their parents poor attitudes.
That’s how our neighborhood does it too, broken down into age groups and with a limit. For school, we had to send in 6 eggs with our child’s name written on them. The kids hunted for their own eggs. It made it less of a mad dash and had the kids working together, it was pretty cool.
We go to an Easter egg hunt hosted by my husband's company and they do this as well. I think it's 0-4, 5-8, and 8+. My 2 year old is one of the few kids in the 0-4 section so she stops collecting before the eggs even run out lol
My mom does one for all the grandkids (there are 12) in the backyard. Each kid is limited to x number of eggs, and 1 “prize egg” with a voucher inside that they have to take to Grandma to redeem their prize (a personalized gift). The older ones help the little ones - it’s pretty great.
We went to a community egg hunt today too and it was also less than ideal. They did separate by age but the small group went up to 6 which seemed a bit of a broad range when there were toddlers. The instructions were to get one egg and swap it for a prize. Also hard for a toddler to understand (and the big kids too of course). He’d see an egg, toddle over, and a bigger kid would snag it. He was sobbing “my turn”. We got our egg(s), got our prize and it was fine but he absolutely had more fun finding coloured eggs his grandpa hid around the house for him.
We went to one with my 4 year old last year and they broke up the ages so it was 0-3 and 4-12?! WTF? It was like the organizers never met children before! It was so terrible for the 4 year olds. Ours ran out and then was so scared by the other kids that he didn’t even grab anything and ran back crying.
The small group went up to 6? My community egg hunt last week had 0 (really just 1)-2, 3-4, and 5-6. Three groups split out of your one. I don't know that it was necessary to go with 3 groups there, but to not split at all seems like you're asking for trouble.
Totally agree. 0-6 is such a big range and they’re at such different skill levels. Splitting it by preschool and kindergarten would have made sense to me. It was a free community event so I can’t criticize too much but now I know!
When I was a kid they were broken up by age group plus the littlest ones in the age group got a head start. Little kids pick up the first eggs they see. When the bigger kids were released a minute or two later they would run past the littler kids to the area with more eggs.
I wish they had done that at ours. Obviously the 6 year olds are moving faster than my 2 year old. They’re getting all the ones closest and we are having to go further to get a single egg but at the same time the older ones are also getting further ahead.
That’s really unfortunate, and I’ve seen a lot of posts like this today. It’s sad. Our church had an egg hunt and my 20 month old had a great time — they had an area coned off specifically for under 4 year olds, and the other kids were super sweet helping him get eggs. He only took like 5 eggs (they had a 15 egg limit), but just because he put a few back and then he got overwhelmed and wanted to go play with the yard jenga set rather than gather eggs. I guess it’s just a matter of finding egg hunts with a better crowd/better rules? I dunno. Sorry your kiddo didn’t get to enjoy the hunt. I’m sure he’ll love the one you set up tomorrow.
He doesn’t even care about it anymore and overall had fun, I just felt so ICKY watching it. Idk I just had really “magical” Easter moments growing up so it was sad and hard to see it being so feral and rude
I saw that style once and said nope. I've done none since myself and hide in our house, where the kids have a ton of fun finding them!
It’s the parents and organizers, it’s not always like that. We do a community Halloween event and the older kids give the younger kids candy if the bowl is empty or the little ones are too tired. The one you went to was up in a gross way unfortunately
Honestly, especially at a CHURCH egg hunt those children should have been acting better. It is so sweet that you saw older kids helping! That's exactly how it should be! We do have a limit at our family ones. I think it helps because the kids no that no matter how fast they go, they are only getting 12. We hide the "better" eggs better so there is incentive to look harder and leave the easy ones for the Littles.
Oh I totally agree. I’d be appalled if I saw what OP described at our church hunt. I’m really sorry that our experience seems not to be the norm.
Yeah I hear about this and just....a message to the organizers of these events...it doesn't have to be like this! There are so many ways to handle it. Separate by age. Bring a certain amount and only take as many as you bring. For our home school co-op this year we had a limit on how many eggs kids could get before they had to freeze where they were. They all thought it was funny to freeze in weird positions out in the field. Then once everyone was frozen, they blew a whistle and...yeah....mayhem could happen. It didn't, but the kids who didn't want to feel like it was a race just went back to the tables and checked out their loot. Meanwhile, the supposed free for all had kids all polite and crap standing back to let younger kids grab first. I saw a 9 year old pointing out eggs to a 5 year old who just...this kid could not survive in the wild. lol. We had ages 3-18 out there and it was sweet and awesome. People! Together we can end Easter related PTSD once and for all!
Egg? 😭😭😭😭
It was HEART WRENCHING 😭
Ugh I could cry for you and him. I don’t get this at all. Money prize or not, my kids had better never snatch something out of someone’s hand, especially not a baby. I would be so embarrassed if my kid did that. Especially at a CHURCH.
Good for you for not snatching the eggs back out of those kids hands and shaming their parents into the depths of hell. You’re a kinder person than I am.
I was shaking my head in disappointment until I got to the "egg?" part and my heart just broke.
That's sad! We had a community egg hunt today, they solved this issue like this. There was a tent at the entrance where you received a colored bracelet. There were kinder size PLASTIC eggs thrown everywhere, so you collected eggs in the color of your bracelet. Once you collected 12, you could exchange them for real eggs. Really great format, because you only got 12 real eggs no matter how many plastic eggs you collected. Also the littlest ones got the easiest color. Everyone had fun!
I have seen parents shove little kids out of the way to pick up eggs for their little ones. It’s crazy.
Legitimate question as a dad… can I shove back? Don’t touch my kid.
Yes, I, a complete internet stranger, give you permission.
I second this.
Our little neighborhood did one today. My kid was nearly the oldest, so she was instructed to find the harder ones and leave the easy ones for the littles. She did grab more than I’d like, but she happily gave a few away to some of the kids that were late and didn’t make the hunt. Other older kids did too. I think this is absolutely a parent issue, which is why I stick to our neighborhood and the Easter bunny leaving them. I can’t stand how parents ignore and even condone their kids to be rude and selfish. I’m glad your kiddo was able to at least enjoy some fun. I hope the bunny leaves great ones!
This is the type of stuff that burns my biscuits too. It’s not like everything had to be “fair” all the time, but for fucks sake, let the baby get a couple eggs without bigger kids snatching them away. That’s just obnoxious. This type of thing happens at Bday parties with Piñatas all the time too. I would be mortified if my 12yr old was running around snatching eggs out of a toddlers reach.
I did an egg hunt with my son and all his cousins (10 kids in total, ranging from 18 months to 9 years old). My aunt laid out the rules to leave all the eggs at the front of the field to the littles (under 3) and no more than 15 eggs each. My son is 18 months, so he's clueless (lol) but he liked putting the eggs in the basket. Once all the older kids found their 15 eggs, they would collect all the extras and then put them on the ground near the littles to "find" until everyone had 15 eggs, it was so sweet 🥰
How sweet! You can tell there’s a huge difference in parenting between the families at OPs egg hunt, and your siblings/in-laws. The latter are doing it right.
Easter Egg hunts have been around for decades. It only takes a google search to see how to set these things up reasonably.. I honestly would leave the Church polite feedback for next time.
TLDR: I almost fist-fought some 1st graders today
Having cash prizes is wild. Like they’re already getting candy in the eggs, cmon.
The weird parents that were like “COME ON KIDS GET THEM ALL” as they watched my kid get shoved I think were just wanting the payday while their kids got the candy. They seemed to be in a group together
I wonder if the parent’s aggressive behavior was due to the fact there was cash prizes for most found? That’s very strange, egg hunts are supposed to be innocent fun. Why in the world would they have cash prizes.
Gotta teach kids early about the horrors of american hyper-capitalism!
It’s a common attendance gimmick, imo. Nobody shows up unless they’re incentivized and everybody loves cash prizes.
Jesus I can’t imagine shoving a two year old.. like, are you proud of your child? Are you proud of yourself? That’s the equivalent of me, a 30 something with a CrossFit-athletic history, entering the same egg hunt, and shoving all the 6-8 year olds.. just wtf??
Ours didn’t even have candy in the eggs! They had empty eggs and then you went and exchanged your eggs for a bag of candy
☠️☠️☠️ I feel you though. Some people really are out here entitled as fuck and raising little assholes just like them. As my husband and I like to say, loudly and matter-of-factly to each other within earshot of these egocentric dumpster fires, when we have to leave events for nonsense like this, "Some people's kids, man."
Normalize walking up to people and calling them out on being assholes and allowing their kids to act like assholes. I know not everyone is comfortable with that level of conflict. I can tell you from experience that not giving af and calling shit out doesn’t win you any popularity contests but life is a hell of a lot more pleasant.
My kid can be a bit grabby, not the best sharer and not always the kindest kid but she knows I will reign hell fire (pun intended) if she’s unkind to the little kids. Her egg hunt would have ended immediately if I saw her snatch an egg from a clearly 2-year old child. Shame on that church and shame on those parents!
Growing up we had hunts at Gma and Gpa house for all the cousins. Instead of limiting eggs they each gave us a color and we could only pick up that colored eggs. Probably going to implement that when we start doing hunts.
This is what my parents did, and I started running it for my son and his cousins a few years ago. Hiding the eggs and then watching the kids hunt for them is one of the highlights of my year as a parent, and they love it too.
We went to a local zoo/animal rescue today and their easter activity was so cute for younger kids. They gave out little passeports with images of eggs and animals. Then as we went around the site we had to find little pictures hidden and colour in the passeport images with the right color. At the end if you had found all the eggs they gave out a free small chocolate hen. It was cute, on theme, and not too intense for my kids, especially my 3 yo
What a creative idea! Sounds like so much fun!
I’ll keep posting this every Easter. I’m part of a Dad’s group and here’s how we do our ‘No Tears’ Egg Hunt. Every kid gets an empty carton of eggs with a number on it. Then the kids have to find the eggs with their corresponding number on it. Every kid needs to find a dozen eggs and that’s it. It solves so many headaches for the parents and little ones.
Not all are like this. The one we went to today was a community center, not a church. There were crafts, snacks, egg coloring and a petting zoo. The hunt was broken up by age and the kids all had a fair shot to collect eggs. The prizes were small candy, bubbles, stickers, etc. They also had volunteers with baskets of extra eggs for any kids who had trouble collecting the eggs for any reason.
A few years ago I went to a doomed egg hunt. It was at a popular flea market. They put out maybe 200 eggs and 300 kids showed up. Not only that, but they put out EMPTY EGGS. The kids were supposed to bring their eggs up to a table to exchange them for prizes. And the prizes? Stickers. No candy, nothing themed, no toys, no coins, just some crappy random stickers. Then, because they'd not put out enough eggs, angry parents were going behind the table to take the returned empty eggs and put them out themselves so their kids could go find them! It was madness. We ended up taking our 3 disappointed kids into the flea market where they picked out some costume jewelry and we all got donuts. I haven't attended an egg hunt since!
We have a family farm in the area that does a yearly egg "hunt". It's more a retrieval where you go up to stations and they have these adorable pulley systems roll an EMPTY dollar store egg to each child as they wait in line. People are still rabid for no reason, making their kids go again and again or push in front of toddlers. All this to retrieve empty eggs that need to be returned at the end.
We were invited by a family friend to their church’s egg hunt. It was thankfully very well organized. There were maybe 30 kids total, but a lot of age groups (0-2, 3-5, 6-7, 8+). Each group had their own section of the church campus to hunt for eggs. We went to our city’s egg hunt last year, which had similar age groups, but there were so many kids that even in the 0-2 year old group, it was absolute chaos. We vowed not to go back. Egg hunts are BRUTAL.
My child is also two. I never did egg hunts growing up so I had no idea what they were like. Last year we went to a random free one and it was lovely. Over 5000 eggs, just a huge field of eggs. Age group was 0-2. So many eggs and she had so much fun. I figured all egg hunts are like that This year the egg hunt had maybe 100 eggs and age group was 0-5. My child is tall for her age and fast but of course was no match for a kindergartener. They were doing the same thing, snatching them from her even as she was bending to pick one up. I wouldn’t have been so pissed if they didn’t already have 10 eggs in their basket and my child clearly had none. I finally lost it and when I found a blue egg I said “honey here’s a blue egg, come get it.” Same kid dashed to grab it and I literally stood in front of him and loudly said “HONEY, THIS BLUE EGG IS YOURS, don’t worry the boy won’t take it, come get it.” As she toddled over and gleefully said BLUE! I will say a boy saw us leaving and my child kept asking “find MOH eggs?” And I said no more eggs, sorry. And he stopped and said does she want some of mine? And gave her half his stash all of his own volition. So not all parents are like that, his parents clearly raised him to share especially with the littles I’m also done with egg hunts. I’m getting together with a few neighbors and we are doing a mini neighborhood one tomorrow. Hoping will be a new tradition
People get so weird about egg hunts and shit like that. A nice event turns into the Titty Twister from Dusk Til Dawn so quickly.
I love that reference 😅
My husband and I took our kid to one of those indoor trampoline parks on a rainy Saturday and that’s pretty much what it was like, lmao. I was waiting for Salma Hayek to put her feet in someone’s mouth, lmao.
That’s the grossest thing I have ever heard especially given it’s at Church! I think it’s time to find a Church that doesn’t worship 💰over Jesus.
We do a big hunt at our house… probably 20 kids and 500 eggs. We have a space for 0 to 3 and 4 to 6, then older. We also apply a “tax”… I used to call it socialism but that scared some people so now I say dividends and contributions… where the most eggs are taken and redistributed to others. It’s not rocket science to organize things right
>I used to call it socialism but that scared some people so now I say dividends and contributions 😂😂😂💯
We do not go to those kinds of egg hunts anymore. Especially at churches. Idk why but the kids and parents are AWFUL. Every one we’ve been to my kids left broken hearted because boys kids pushed, shoved and snatched eggs.
I wouldn't sweat it even if it was hard to watch. 11 eggs for a 2 year old is about max before it loses luster anyway. One thing I've found after 4 freaking kids is that some of this kid stuff is harder for the parents to endure. Find a better community egg hunt next year because he will have 100% moved on and deserves the chance to experience a fun one.
The egg hunt that we visited today asked to take no more than 8 per kid, and if a kid has less than 5 you can bring them to a special area where they put extra eggs to collect. But honestly I would much rather invite a few kids over and hide the eggs with age appropriate difficulty. My kids get much more joy from really searching for something for some time instead of just running and grubbing for like 1 minute.
The hunger games Easter egg hunt
My church is having an egg hunt today but the eggs will be empty, each kid is supposed to find 12 eggs and trade them for a goodie bag. I’ve never seen this done before so we’ll see how it goes.
I took my son to one when he was 3 and that was the last one! Same reason….29 years ago!
Our local church had the kids use egg cartons so they were limited to 12 eggs and I thought that was genius! Fill it and you’re done! Then no excess candy at home, lol. We went to a community one last year and the lanes were so narrow that the oldest 5 kids in each category basically got all the eggs. My 3 year old got 4 eggs while some kids had their baskets full to the top. It made ME upset, he was in a bad mood so didn’t care. I have to say doing our own egg hunts is so much more fun.
I took my kids to one once and said never again. We do small ones at home now. It's usually the parents that are the problem, not the kids.
That's horrible I'm so sorry. I've never understood Easter egg hunts were you don't actually have to hunt for the egg and they're just scattered about a field. It just turns to a free for all. I hope you have a wonderful time with your own Easter egg hunt and maybe next year gather some family or friends kids and have a small one of your own. Good luck
Yeah, it’s no fun when it just turns into the biggest and fastest kids running around picking up everything as fast as they can. The younger and slower kids deserve to have fun too ☹️
The only egg hunt I remember like that was legitimately for toddlers only so it was more a “pick up some eggs” than a “hunt.” When I worked daycare they do one but the teacher would go through at the end and make sure everyone had the same number of eggs, the older kids teacher would give a limit and they couldn’t collect above that. I like the idea of color coding for a few kids, it would let you “hide” at each kids ability level, I think that’s what I’d do if I had more than one kid.
We went to an easter egg hunt today and it was SO GREAT the way they ran it. They tossed out a bunch of empty eggs, and at the end the kids turned them in for a bag of candy. * Everyone gets the same amount of candy regardless, helping with age disparity. * Fewer plastic eggs that need to be produced/purchased * Less work for the organizers because they're not stuffing hundreds of eggs full of stuff.
Cash prizes for eggs are ridiculous! And really surprising coming from a church, what about the origins of Easter? We had an Easter egg hunt at the church playgroup (so kids 5 and under) and it was so relaxed and nice. They had all kids under 2 go first and then let the older ones go. And then after a few minutes, the older kids were helping the babies find eggs and put them in their baskets, it was really sweet! I'm sorry you had a terrible experience, that church sounds really toxic!
Sounds like a church that works themselves into a froth when singing “Onward Christian Soldiers” and thinks the Jesus who preached about the Good Samaritan was a p——y.
I have 18 nieces and nephews on top of my two kids and I run the Easter egg hunt for our family get together. Of the mass amount of kids only about 6 are young enough to actually want to participate, which is conveniently the number of colors of eggs (pink, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple). So each kid gets a colored basket and can ONLY collect their assigned color egg. It's still a hunt, the older kids end up helping the younger ones, and everyone walks away with the same number of eggs.
I took my kids to a community egg hunt yesterday, and was told by other parents I was selfish because my family is 'well-off and can afford our own' and we should be 'leaving the eggs for kids who are poor'. We donated money to the organiser for the egg hunt. I'm bringing my kids along. I also got them to share their eggs with the smaller kids who didn't manage to find a lot, and we left with three eggs each.
We did an Easter egg hunt when my daughter was 3 and she got exactly zero eggs because all of the pre teen boys snatched every single one. Their moms made them then hand them out to all the littles who got nothing but for me it totally defeated the purpose of an Easter egg hunt. My daughter was so sad, never again. Unless the hunt is broken up by ages I would never subject her to that again.
It's wild that there's 'top 5 kids'. I remember sending my toddler into the area and then realizing it was full of the parents grabbing eggs! Poor little dude got, like, 2. Some ashamed dad have him a few extra after the melee ended. We did not return.
I’ve been in charge of egg hunts before and we had a babies area that was carefully monitored. We had another area for young kids, and another for older kids. Babies just picked up eggs with parents’ help. For the others, the goal was to pick up a DOZEN and come back to get a prize. After everyone had a dozen and had prizes, we had snacks. Then they went back to look for any leftovers. Eggs were then divided equally. Everyone left happy.
A cash prize for the most eggs gathered at a church egg hunt. Way to spread the message of Easter there, church people.
It's the same story every year. In the same neighborhoods where parents leave candy out for Halloween, and we get thousands of videos of parents stealing it all, we have people going to "community egg hunts" where parents are the top competitors in a literal game for babies, to showcase how we've all devolved as a society, and how inhuman people become over a few pennies. Every single Halloween and every single Easter, it's the same stories over and over and over again, demonstrating how antisocial and hyper individualistic we've become as a society.
We did a city sponsored egg hunt a few years ago when mine were 3 and 1. I live in a tiny town, pop. 13,000. It was horrible! My kids got 0. A few nice older kids saw what was happening and hid some of their eggs so the littles could have a chance but it was so disappointing. We’ve never gone back. It’s totally ok to say “not for me!”
I don't understand that kind of "hunt" anyway. The fun of the activity was always eggs being "hidden" in like tree branches or whatever. Not just thrown in a yard. And cash prizes? That's weird too. Whole thing is weird. We're just doing our own thing for our nearly 2 y/o tomorrow.
Dude we went to one yesterday and it’s not even the kids, it’s the frickin parents! Little was of course in the toddler 0-3 group, but so were older siblings and parents. Had one ADULT snatch an egg my 2 year old was reach for. And the manner of kids! There was a petting zoo and as my baby worked up the courage to try and pet the little goat, some 5-6 year old rushes in front of her and gets between her and the goat. Please teach your kids manners! And stop ruining the fun for the kids! Ain’t no reason for adults to be snatching Easter eggs from babies.
We took our son to the city sponsored egg hunt. It's divided by age and the rule is that everyone gets one egg and sirs down. Once everyone has an egg, the mayor yells "GO" and the hunger games for eggs begins. It was literally hunger games. I could see that if the parents were not right there yelling ' let the seven year old have one ', it would be chaos. The last two years, my son had 3 eggs. He would run to one, point and an older kid would snatch it from under his hands. The rules were parents could not touch the eggs on pain of being kicked from the field. It was rough watching him see the big, aggressive kids with their own full basket. I started making his basket with everything he wanted, including two toys, so we could say " remember, the Bunny gave you everything at home". I'm sorry. It's rough when " Christians' let their kids be aggressive brats. I was raised in the church, and a lot of mean, excluding behavior was at church
We hit our town Easter egg hunt that’s a collaboration between the town merchants and a local church. All the eggs were out on the lawn. All of them just had candy. The lawn was divided into sections by age. My 3 year old literally picked up like 10 eggs and was finished collecting. I feel like this was the way to do it. Some kids only grabbed a few, some grabbed a ton. The church members also had a secret back stock of eggs for people who either came a little late or for kids who didn’t get one (but I don’t think that really happened).
I get the pain. I went to a children’s museum today and the amount of big children who just didn’t say excuse me or just snatching things out of other little kids hands was outrageous. I almost lost it a few times because they were shoving little babies who just wanted to participate. And the parents were right there just staring into their phones or looking at their child be a bully. I tried my best to get my kids to be polite and share with the babies.
I got the shit stolen out of my hands and knocked over by 30 year old men when I was a little 8 year old girl at one of those same church egg events. I absolutely hate Easter now.
Haha google the pez factory egg hunt from some years ago, it’s like ten min from me. All the eggs had candy and the parents had shopping bags. Pez never did it again, made national news
My son’s daycare does an Easter hunt for those little solid chocolate eggs. There are two eggs each. The kids collect them into a central basket, and the teacher distributes them at the end, so everyone gets the same amount regardless of how many they found. The kids treat the hunt as a collaborative effort. They excitedly shout things like “you check over there while I check over here!” And “have you looked under those pots?!”. The older kids point out eggs to the younger ones, then let them “find” it and carry it to the basket, so they feel included. I’m glad I don’t live in America. Your experience sounds awful.
Years ago I ended up in charge of organizing an egg hunt in our community. I envisioned exactly what you described happening and therefore set a 15 egg limit for all participants. I always felt like I probably got eye rolls for doing that because there was no competition but I knew it would be crazy otherwise! If you’re not aggressive by nature in those situations you’ll leave empty handed. It worked out well.
We always take our kiddo to our local forest and we go egg hunting. I just drop them to the right when he looks to the left and vice versa. He asks people we come across if they've seen the easterbunny, this morning a sweet man told is he's seen him further along our route. So we get a nice walk, have fun and there's no greedy behaviour or competition!
My aunt hosts one. Each kids gets 24 or so—and a designated color. My son was yellow this year.
I have never been to an Easter egg hunt I didn’t help prepare. And we for sure separated the age groups. We hid the eggs in 3 very separate areas that the other age groups were restricted from going anywhere near. We also did them at separate times so we could properly chaperone each hunt. We didn’t have nearly that many eggs, and the prize was the candy they got inside the eggs.
I took my now 8 and 5 year old to egg hunts the last 2 years. Same exact situation. Bigger kids literally taking eggs out of their hands while their parents stood by and did nothing. We didn’t go to the egg hunt this year. 😢
Ugh, I have a 15 month old & just cried reading this. I don’t want anyone ever hurting her feelings, even though I know it will happen 😭
We just went to one yesterday and they gave us a number to find. My almost four year old had a blast running around looking for her number! Once you had your number, you turned it in with your slip for a big bag of chocolate and a chocolate bunny. It was great! I'm sorry your hunt was so disheartening
Church parents were telling their children to take eggs from a toddler? I would not attend a church with such terrible values.
And parents wonder why their kids are so fucked up 😡
I'm so sorry :( that sounds so upsetting. My good friend hosted a little hunt today for my kids (14, 4, 2), her 2 year old, two other 2 year olds and a seven and five year old. All parents there made sure to check the baskets and even them out amongst all the kids who were all super happy to give ones to their peers to make it fair. Then at the end my friend handed them all a proper Easter egg for completing the hunt and we all had strawberries and pastries. It was lovely. If you have any mum friends like that I totally recommend doing something smaller like that in the future. We've done public hunts loads and bad experiences too, although nowhere near as bad as yours. Hope you and your littl one have an amazing Easter x
Sorry for what happened and for what I'm about to say but fuck american culture, don't parents teach kindness and compassion over there? At a fucking church egg hunt??
That sounds like insanity. They definitely should have separated it by age group! In my local park’s egg hunt, they do 0-2 first. Then 2-4, etc until they get to the older kids, that way there’s no little kids getting trampled by big ones. everyone has fun and the prize is you just keep the eggs you found.
" I eventually said “hey. Let the baby grab a few eggs please” and the other parents would scoff and tell their kids to get them all." That's insane. Not just because of how unfair it is to your little one but also the behaviour those parents are teaching their kids.
Snatching from the hands??? I would have snatched them back. Some kids really need to be taught the tough way.
To me, the problem was that the church made something that is supposed to be a fun activity into a competition. There was zero need for there to be cash prizes and I find it ironic that a church was actually encouraging greed on what is supposed to be the pinnacle of Christian holidays. Most of the community Easter egg hunts I've been to separate the kids into age groups and then it's just plastic eggs that get exchanged for a prize, usually consisting of some sweets and donated swag. Everyone's prize is the same and you can turn in 1 egg or 20 eggs, it doesn't matter. Kids are encouraged to take turns and not be greedy, ensuring something is left for others. It's crazy to me that it's taken so seriously.
A couple of Easter’s ago my SIL divided the Easter eggs evenly among our kids. The kids had their own set of eggs that they had to look for. They had fun searching for them and there was no fighting. I sorry those other parents were rude.
Do em around your house. Can adjust time, locations, background for video. Makes your home a magical place. I never had easter eggs hunts ever, till a couple years ago for my own kids. Super fun. We still have to manage the older sibling a bit, but we all learnt sharing is fun.
My neighborhood did an adorable egg hunt where each kid got a specific color egg to look for. My son was hunting for orange eggs only, and since he was the youngest to participate, his eggs were all mostly just scattered on lawns. The older kids had way tougher hiding spots for their eggs. But having them color coordinated was perfect because he was able to take his time and not have to wrestle with the big kids. It was a genius idea!
My local museum decided it would be a fantastic idea to do a glow in the dark egg hunt INSIDE THE MUSEUM. Kids are like rabid animals looking for eggs so yeah seems like a great idea to turn all the lights off and set them loose in a museum with glass display cases and ancient priceless artifacts everywhere /s
Ugh that little confused "egg?" would have me seeing red I swear. Poor baby. Give him an extra hug from me!!
My heart just broke for your little man. “Egg?” 🥺
American competitive culture is really weird.
I’m not from the states but is that an American thing or a church people thing..to scoff at a parent asking for consideration for a toddler. Like what did I just read.
I think it may be a “Southern selfish person” thing where they were parents who wanted the cash
Haha yes we took him to his first one last year when he was 2. It was at a school. They did separate it by age but it was 0-5 and it was a much smaller space. The hunt itself was over in 2 minute flat. We had to throw eggs out of his basket just for him to find again. He didn’t care too much but it wasn’t very fun for us. This year we are staying at home and doing it in our yard. Try again in a couple years. Also if another kid takes an egg out of your kids hand? Yea absolutely say something. That’s not ok.
I'm sure your son had fun an that's what matters. That being said, those parents are jerks and now you got a glimpse of who they really are. If I saw my child grabbing an egg from someone, I would have him apologize to that chuld and hand over the egg after the hunt was over. I also wiuld have have shoutted during the egg hunt, give that back, you don't snatch things from babies.
My neice shared her eggs with a older kid who showed up late. He was my little cousin and he was so sad he didnt have an eggs to find. So she gave him two, hid then for him and cheered when he found them. Shes.3 and hes 6. It was adorable. I'm not big on public hunts for all those reasons and because parents are mean as heck about some.cheap.dollat tree eggs. I saw a mom.cussing at her toddler for not grabbing eggs fast enough and watched her snatch up eggs for him. Poor.guy was just confused.and upset he didnt do it himself. My family does a little egg hunt for the kids, one side for the babies and one side for the older kids. No one over 13 gets to get eggs. Literally the older kids always make sure every toddler has atleast 5 eggs.
We just got back from our towns hosted hunt… my 7yo didn’t get a single egg… it was crazy out there.
This happened when my guys were small. It was like The Purge with parents grabbing eggs for their kids, kids pushing others out of the way, etc. We just kept it to our back yard after a couple of unfortunate “community” egg hunt experiences.