To hate pinatas for kids?

[Crunchymum]

I may or may not be watching This Morning

Seriously though, watching those kids with cricket bats and wooden baseball bats going town on the pinatas made me feel a bit uncomfortable.

AIBU?

You're right! Bloody stupid things!
I hate them!

I used to live in a tenement flat in Glasgow and our living room was enormous.

One year when DD1 was 8 I decided we would host a Halloween party. I cleared all the furniture out of the room except the sofa and one table (for food) and had lots of things like apple bobbing and dunking hands in custard for them in the kitchen.

I got a piñata and the loved it. Once it was smashed open they spent about 20 minutes gathering up all the sweets, shouting 3,2,1 and then throwing them up and then trying to find them all again.

I had 30 kids in my house that evening and it was crazy but fun. One girl cracked my doorframe with the stick when she missed the piñata, I had no idea 8 year olds were so strong!

I make them for my kids parties - mostly because I'm too tight to buy one but that way they can choose the design (within reason, im no great artist so it needs to be balloon shape based) - have done football, pokerball, dinosaur egg, octonaut themed ones, pig, fish, caterpillar. My top tip is to have a bag of sweets to one side and distribute to those who don't get many out of the mad rush. I always tell them that they won't miss out. They seem to relax then and all enjoy it.

I do it instead of party bags - they take home whatever they get and it finishes the party nicely.

OMG I have no idea that piñatas were so controversial!

They seem to be at every kids party at the moment so we duly obliged for DS's party. The ones you get in like Tesco or Toys r us don't seem to break very well, they have a string that you pull to let all the sweets out.

Was quite proud of myself for enforcing order and getting the kids to line up at a safe distance so no one got twatted round the head with the stick. However, our risk assessment wasn't thorough enough because we missed the fact that below the tree we had hung it in was all tall weeds and some nettles, and when all the sweets fell out the kids just went for it and were digging through dirty weeds and nettles like animals to get the sweets. None of them gave a fuck about being stung!

You need to wear one of these when the pinata bashing starts, then you won't see the violence.

No wait - it's the child holding the stick who's meant to be blindfolded. Is it so that they don't see their own unspeakably violent act?

Goodness - there are some fully ignorant people on this thread.

YABU Pinatas are good fun and outlet for excited youngsters. Everyone in our area has latched onto them and the kids are now experts in destroying them. We should up the game and make them use a blindfold though.

Not sure how you can complain about cultural appropriation, when your grasp of geography and the fact that a continent isn't actually one homogenous country is tenuous, to say the least.

I think the fact that they are Mexican, and Mexico is part of Noth America has been explained.
They are quite a ritualised part of a Mexican Party, with an song that accompanies the hitting action and the best enforced line I saw there anywhere. It isn't that different to pin the tail on the donkey apart from the sweets. DC are quite violent in some ways and bashing something while blindfold is fun for most of them. Either the piñata is something meaniful to DC or it can be a statement of some kind like the pp's Trump, in that way it is a little like a guy Fawkes effigy.

Oh wow. It's never occurred to me it's anything beyond another party game.

I feel like I should feel bad for pass the parcel being violently ripped open and passed round

And as above definitely I feel bad for the donkey bums now

This is so weird. I'm stepping away from MN for tonight. It's got that feeling you get when on YouTube and before you know it cat videos lead you into the darkest corners of conspiracy theories

We do something similar in summer, except the child is blindfolded and hits a watermelon with a bat. Sometimes we make a watermelon-shaped piñata filled with sweets.

I remember when my friend got one for her child's party the thing was so strong she ended up having to get her husband to beat hell out of it with a baseball bat... it was unbelievably resilient!

A few months later my sister bought one for my niece's birthday - I asked her what the kids were gonna use to hit it and she produced the inner cardboard tube from a kitchen roll... oh how I laughed!!!

YABU for watching daytime TV.

Maybe British kids need to be taught not to grovel for sweets like their lives depend on it. 🤷‍♀️ I’ve seen kids in other cultures use piñatas and even though there was a rush, it wasn’t some Lord of the Flies-level scrimmage for sugar.

YANBU. It’s a weird thing to get so excited about, smacking an animal representation so hard. It’d be better if it were just a ball.

What a stupid thread

I don't like them either. Especially the animal-shaped ones

Our home made piñatas were the highlight of every party that we made them for. The kids just loved them, and there was lots of fun and excitement. The kids line up from youngest to oldest and each have one hit with a bat (we always have a bit of a mixture of ages at our parties). It takes a while for a few little things to start to come out, and the tension and excitement mounts.

We absolutely filled ours with confetti, streamers, a big bag of hundreds of used stamps, lots of tiny prizes like little toy animals, stickers, small sweets, and a wrapped gift for each child, with a name on it. I would keep back a pile of little things for the shyer kids, and just discreetly drop them in front of those children, but actually everyone swapped and shared very happily.

I have made at least 10 piñatas, and never seen anyone at any party go crazy being violent, nor have I seen any one being terribly selfish about the prizes. It is fun.

the Pinata is definitely designed to make kids go insane, no doubt about that...
I had never even heard of them, until my daughter had a little south American friend at school, then it seemed they were all the rage.
Orrible things really.

I had assumed that @madjanice was being facetious, if not then I am rather disturbed

We had one at my kids' last birthday party. There was this little kid there, 4yo, tiny, sweet little person, l and the look of concentrated rage on her face as she attacked the pinata was bloody terrifying

Very Tory idea ... all blood sports and greed! 🤣

I find it really funny, watching kids go a bit crazy with piñatas. Being encouraged to whack something with all of your strength is such a gift. I've seen video footage of myself hitting one with a broom handle, and my face is pure primal rage

I assume that mad Janice is being tongue in cheek but I still don’t understand what a NIL is?

We absolutely filled ours with confetti, streamers, a big bag of hundreds of used stamps, lots of tiny prizes like little toy animals, stickers, small sweets, and a wrapped gift for each child, with a name on it.

Back up a moment... used stamps? Hundreds of them?