Linear Separation of Children and Adults

The other day, we took our daughter to her classmate’s birthday party. Since she is still relatively new in the school, and we don’t yet know too many of the other parents, both of us went, with the intention that we could talk to and get to know some of her classmates’ parents.

Not much of that happened, and based on our experience at two other recent children’s parties, it had to do with the physical structuring of children and adults at the party.

As Matt Levine frequently likes to say, everything is in seating charts.

Not easily finding too many other parents to talk to, the wife and I decided to have a mutual intellectual conversation on what makes for a “successful” kids’ birthday party. Based on four recent data points, the answer was clear – linear separation.

This is how we plan parties at home. This is the adjacency graph of all the guests we expect at our daughter's birthday party. Each node represents a family.

Good thing is everyone is connected to at least one other person. Bad thing is the graph is not connected. pic.twitter.com/WVPkjs8yY0

— Karthik (@karthiks) September 20, 2019

At our daughter’s little party at our home four months back, we had set up the balcony and the part of the living room closest to it with all sorts of sundry toys, and all the children occupied that space. The adults all occupied the other (more “inner”) part of the living room, and spoke among each other. Maybe our Graph Theory helped, but to the best of the knowledge, most adults spoke to one another, though I can’t tell if someone was secretly bored.

At the other party where we managed to network a fair bit with daughter’s classmate’s parents, there was simply one bouncy castle at one end of the venue. All the children were safely inside that castle. Parents had the other side of the venue all to themselves, and it was easy to talk to one another (most people were standing, and there were soft drinks on offer, which made it easy to walk around between groups and talk to a wide variety of people).

In the recent party where we concocted this theory, the children were in the middle of the venue, and around that, chairs had been set up. This radial separation was bad for two reasons – firstly, you were restricted to talking  to people in your own quadrant since it was impractical to keep walking all the way around since most of the central space was taken up by the kids. Secondly, chairs meant that a lot of the parents simply put NED and sat down.

It is harder to approach someone who is seated and strike up a conversation, than doing so to someone who is standing. Standing makes you linear, and open (ok I’m spouting some fake gyaan I’d been given during my CAT interview time), and makes you more approachable. Seating also means you get stuck, and you can’t go around and network.

So parents and event managers, when you are planning the next children’s party, ensure that the children and adults are linearly separable. And unless the number of adults is small (like in the party we hosted – which happened before we knew any of the daughter’s friends from school), make them stand. That will make them talk to each other rather than get bored.