How a Smart Stategy Saved Our Easter Egg Hunt from Cancellation

USA Today recently published an article "Aggressive 'helicopter' parents force egg hunt cancellation." According to the article, Old Colorado City Association, organizers of an annual Easter egg hunt in Colorado Springs, Colorado attended by hundreds of children in the past years have canceled this year's event. The reason? Behavior of aggressive parents who swarmed into the tiny park last year, determined that their kids get an egg.


As in many public parks where egg hunts commonly take place, there was no place to hide the plastic eggs, which were filled with donated candy or coupons redeemable at nearby businesses. So thousands of eggs were placed in plain view on the grass. Even before the “Go,” parents jumped the ropes and egged their kids along. The egg hunt was over in seconds, to the consternation of egg-less tots and their parents.

Photo by Steve Walkowitz/HFA

I volunteer for a family focused not for profit in my hometown and an annual egg hunt is one of many events we organize for our neighborhood. We came fairly close to cancelling our own egg hunt. Each year, volunteers would scout business for candy donations. We would then buy hundreds of plastic eggs from Oriental Trading and other merchants, and spend hours getting them ready. As in the Colorado Springs case, we did our Egg Hunt in a public park, which did not have a place to hide eggs. We did egg hunts at 15 minute intervals for different age groups over a period of two hours. Yet, each race would be over in matter of seconds. A few happy kids, accompanied by aggressive “helicopter” parents, would emerge victorious, with their Easter baskets full. But most other kids, including those of all the volunteers who were busy managing the crowds from breaking into a stampede, would end up in tears because they got nothing. Ironically, soon after Easter, hundreds of these plastic eggs would end up in the garbage and as landfill.

In 2010, a local blogger, himself a non-parent, published a critical piece about our egg hunt. While our hard work and financial expense in organizing a fun community event went unacknowledged, the spotlight shone on how many angry parents and disappointed kids this supposedly fun event generated. We needed to change our strategy. Clearly buying more goody filled plastic eggs was not working, since we had been buying more every year. Our volunteer Theresa had an ephiphany... we decided to buy less!

Our Egg Hunt was transformed into a Spring Fling. We enlisted local high school students and a theater production company to design Easter and Spring themed props. We made nests, haystacks and other cardboard props to hide the eggs. We bought only 300 empty plastic eggs instead of hundreds more of the goody filled ones we bought in the past. The trick was the kids were free to do egg hunting at a leisurely pace, but then they needed to trade in the eggs to get their goody bag, which we filled with healthy snacks, arts and crafts, and coupons, some of which was donated by our generous sponsors. The number of eggs found suddenly didn't matter.

The 2011 egg hunt was a huge success. We didn't have to ration any eggs. We were able to reuse and recycle the plastic eggs for other participants, so we never ran out. Children who came empty handed were encouraged to try again. Parents, even “helicopter” ones did not impart the “winner takes all” attitude to their children. Instead, they were able to relax and enjoy taking lots of fun photos of their children enjoying this fun activity. Finally, the event was a greener, as we were able to keep most of the plastic eggs from ending up in landfill.