Do kids still trick or treat?
I have two kids. I live in a kid-full neighborhood. And the first year, we were inundated with trick or treaters. Watched kids spill out of vehicles clown-car style. Ran out of candy at 8:30, shut the door, turned off all the lights, and still had people ringing the bell insistently after that.
But Ive noticed a significant dropoff in the number of kids I see trick or treating over the years. We definitely don’t have fewer kids – in fact, I’d say there’s a baby boom around these parts.
Are the trick or treaters going to parties or businesses or retail establishments instead? Does it depend on the weather? The day of the week? Or have parents soured on the idea of soliciting candy from strangers in this day and age? Or soured on candy for their kids altogether?
I promise – I give good candy! But in recent years, we’ve had tons left over (even though I keep reducing the amount I buy from year to year.) My kids have a field day ‘trading back’ to the candy bowl, then I package the rest of the stuff up and bring it in to share with co-workers.
I won’t stop giving out candy this year (although I’m tempted.) But I’m curious – where have all the trick or treaters gone?
I’d say you might attribute the dropoff to the micromanagement of children’s diets and the widespread fear that every stranger is either a pedophile or the new Green River Killer. So the kids go to the mall or some other “safe” place to do their trick-or-treating, and you’re left with a full candy bowl and yet another reason not to interact with the people in your community.
Or you could take a look at demographics and remember that there was a baby boom from around 1985 to 1993, and those kids are now too old to trick-or-treat. I know my neighborhood has gone from a whole bunch of under-16s to a whole bunch of older teens and young 20s (including my kids, who are now 16 and 20).
Ridiculous amounts of fear are keeping kids at “harvest parties” these days. It’s stupid. And here’s another thing. More porches are dark now than there used to be. So it’s not just that the kids are staying home or going to yet another over-scheduled, over-planned, over-parented event. It’s also that fewer people are welcoming trick or treaters. That’s what’s happening in my neighborhood at least. We still go trick or treating door to door, and our light is on. So there, Halloween Scrooges.
It’s definitely not due to a lack of young kids in my neighborhood – in fact, we’ve had more empty nesters selling to young families than we have kids getting older.
Every year, we have friends over to our eastside house (they live in SW, where door-to-door trick or treating is just plain unsafe), and they manage to bring back a nice haul. But they have to go farther afield to do so, and they see fewer and fewer kids (I’m the one home manning the candy bowl.)