This week Parent Ping looked at 3 Ps… parties, pyjamas and play! We also have an update on how attitudes are changing as lockdown eases again.
But first…
Some of you have got in touch to ask why are the total number of responses in Parent Ping different, even within the same day? This is because some questions ask about your children (the names or nicknames you have told us will appear in the question). These questions are asked for every child you have told us about and they are asked roughly twice as many times as other questions (an average Pinger has 1.8 children). This means that child questions have roughly twice as many responses as when we ask a question about your views as an individual parent. We hope that helps!
Party!
Lots of you told us party bags are only for kids aged under 11 and are a social no no after that age. One dad explained on Twitter “if my [high school kid] went to a party with party bags, they’d unfriend that poor unfortunate kid with prejudice!”
So, looking just at the responses from Pingers with younger kids, what are the most common items in a party bag?
Here are your top 5 party bag fillers…
1. Birthday cake (80%)
2. Sweets (72%)
3. Stationary or craft (58%)*
4. Stickers / tattoos (44%)
5. Bubbles (43%)**
*far more likely if it’s a birthday girl than a birthday boy
**much more common for the pre-schoolers than the primary-aged kids.
And what do you dread coming home in a party bag? A third of you dread a noisy toy and a quarter of you fear a small plastic toy. A chilled out fifth of you don’t worry about any of it, and absolutely no one said they’d be upset by a book or a piece of cake!
Pyjamas
1 in 10 of you said you’d worn some part of your PJs on the school run. BUT there is considerable variation across the country. For example, only 7% of parents in the East Midlands (admitted) ever having worn pyjamas on the school run, compared to 20% of parents across the border in the West Midlands!
Play
Whilst there are a lot of factors that you take into account when deciding what age to let your child play out alone, there does seem to be a clear trend that once they hit double-digits it’s probably ok. But if you live in London, you are a bit more cautious with far fewer London parents letting their kids out when they are under 10 compared to other parts of the country, and quite a few more waiting until they are over 14 than lots of other places too.
And also…
As lockdown restrictions changed again at the beginning of the week, we checked on how they compared to last month and it seems that as the number of rule changes increases, the level of clarity slightly decreases. There also seems to be a small increase in the unease that some of you feel as society slowly heads back to normal.
Coming up next week
Next week we’ll be following up on our sleep questions as lots of you got in touch to say ‘bedtime’ does not equal ‘sleep time’ in your house and recommending that we dig deeper! Look out for the full expose in next week’s blog!
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