Women, food, and families / Nickie Charles and Marion Kerr.
- Nickie Charles
- Date:
- [1988]
Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)
Credit: Women, food, and families / Nickie Charles and Marion Kerr. Source: Wellcome Collection.
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![34 Women, food and families Fancy buns and shortbread biscuits which my husband iced and put their names on, he's a bit artistic and he got a paintbrush and colours and put everybody's names on and eyes and noses and things like that. A family birthday tea was usually composed of food that was suitable for adults as well as children: Normally either one or both of our families manages to get up and see us and we have a bit of a tea and a birthday cake - nothing out of the ordinary for our tea really, except for the birthday cake and it's always a sponge cake and as long as it's got candles on it they are not bothered. I normally try and do a novelty cake, a shaped one, a train or something like that, trains, boats with ducks on. Last year we had a cat with Smarties and things like that. It seems that birthday parties and teas with typically children's foods are a particularly widespread way of marking younger children's birthdays; as children grow older, around the age of ten or so, birthday treats and outings become more common. Even between the ages of one and five years we can discern age differences in the way children's birthdays are celebrated. A sizeable minority of children (21%) do not have any special food on their first birthday and where there is a celebration it is more likely to take the form of a birthday tea with cake than a birthday party. Birthday parties are more of a feature of children's lives once they reach around the age of 3 years old - almost 60% of children in the 3 to 5 age group within our sample had a birthday party compared with only 25% of children around the age of 2 and even fewer children aged one. Outings and children choosing their own food do not become common until children are older: we do not have figures for this but it was clear from the women's comments on the birthdays of their older children: Kate [11] has stopped having birthday parties but she always has a birthday treat, we'll take her and a couple of friends somewhere - sometimes even for a meal, this year we took her to Bibi's with a couple of friends, that sort of thing, we took her to the ballet last year and then they come here afterwards for tea, or before, depending on whatever it is. Thus the transition from childhood to adolescence and adult¬ hood is marked in the type of food that is used to mark birthdays; at a certain age and stage children's parties and the children's party food that goes with it are abandoned.](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b18028706_0047.JP2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
