I am a cheapskate when it comes to kids’ birthday parties, and I am proud of that fact. Somewhere along the way, kid party culture went from “pizza and a piñata” to “Coachella, but with juice boxes,” and I refuse to participate. My parenting philosophy can best be summarized as: If the city already bought a playground, why would I rent one? So I’ve thrown my fair share of parties at the free neighborhood pool and park myself, thank you very much, and I regret nothing.
Which is exactly why I had no business being as annoyed as I was a couple weeks ago, when I met a friend at our neighborhood pool for a low-key Saturday chat and instead walked into what can only be described as a birthday party with a production budget. You know, the ones that live forever on Instagram Reels, where the balloon arch alone probably cost more than my car. There were at least three dozen 6-year-olds. A unicorn pool floatie the size of a Buick. Tables groaning under the weight of food and gifts. A margarita machine, for the grown-ups who’d apparently decided a pool full of unsupervised 6-year-olds was the ideal setting for day drinking. And zero lifeguards—because ours is a swim-at-your-own-risk pool, and these parents were clearly much bigger risk-takers than I am.
Honestly? I could have lived with all of that. What actually got me was that every chair was taken, every table moved, every pavilion spot claimed. Even the airspace had been colonized by a speaker blasting music that was extremely, aggressively inappropriate for the 6-year-old demographic currently in attendance.
Was I annoyed? Absolutely. Did I have any actual right to be? That’s the part I’m still not sure about, and I turned it over the whole walk home, slightly sunburned (there was no shade left, obviously) and more than slightly petty.
This isn’t just a me problem, nor is it limited to children’s birthday parties. My neighborhood’s Nextdoor page has become a low-grade war zone over this exact issue, and when I went looking, I found the same fight playing out in towns everywhere: free public pools swarmed by private parties, park pavilions colonized at dawn by families who treat “first come, first served” as a personal challenge, beach grills with homemade “reserved” signs that carry all the legal authority of a toddler’s crayon drawing, and gender reveals that leave the ground littered in pink plastic confetti for the rest of us to enjoy for weeks.
So help me work through it: Do people have the right to throw a party in a public space, even if it effectively pushes everyone else out?
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The case for having your party wherever you want
Public means public. That’s not a technicality—it’s the entire point. If the pool is free and open to residents, and the pavilion is first come, first served, then a family celebrating a 7th birthday has exactly as much claim to that space as a woman who just wants to read her book in peace. Nobody’s paying for VIP access. Showing up early and reserving the best pavilion isn’t rude; it’s just how it works in the world of shared amenities. It’s no different, really, than the debate over who gets to recline their airplane seat on a flight you’re both stuck on. And if you didn’t get there before the streamers went up, that’s a you problem.
There’s also a practical reality: Birthdays happen, families are big, backyards are small (or nonexistent, if you rent), budgets are tight, and a public park with a pavilion and a working grill is often the only affordable option a family has. Telling people they can’t celebrate in a space that’s explicitly designed for public use isn’t etiquette—it’s gatekeeping with extra steps.
Just know that public cuts both ways: You get the birthday party, and the birthday party gets the guy on the next bench practicing his ukulele.
The case against hosting a family reunion on the volleyball court
Here’s where it gets messy for me: There’s a real difference between using a shared space and functionally annexing it like a feudal lord expanding his estate but with folding chairs. A family of 10 having a picnic at a pavilion is using the park. A party of 60 that brings its own DJ, cordons off half the pool deck with pool noodles and ignores every posted rule about glass bottles, alcohol and pets isn’t sharing the space—it’s evicting everyone else from it, even though nobody in that other group did anything wrong.
And unlike privately held parties, monopolizing a shared public resource has real victims. They are the other people who also paid taxes, or membership fees, or simply showed up expecting to use the thing that’s supposed to be theirs too.
Most of the conflict starts the moment a host expects strangers to behave like invited guests—moving out of the background of photos, avoiding “their” section of the pool, treating a taped-on “reserved” sign as though it carries the force of law. Reader, it does not. That sign has never held up in any court, including the court of public opinion currently convening on Nextdoor.
What to do if it’s your party
The etiquette really is a matter of scale, age and behavior. A cluster of supervised toddlers is chaotic but harmless; a pack of unsupervised teenagers can flip the whole mood of a space in four minutes flat.
And size isn’t just a vibe—it’s often a legal line. For instance, NYC Parks requires a special events permit for any gathering over 20 people in a park or on a beach, and plenty of other cities and counties draw a similarly hard number. So when some killjoy bystander mutters, “Isn’t there supposed to be a permit for this?” they might not be a killjoy at all; they might just be right.
Behavior is where good parties go bad. Outdoor spaces are loud by nature, and that’s fine. What’s not fine is treating public as a synonym for mine: blasting music that drowns out an entire pool deck, hoarding every chair in a 50-foot radius or shooing other families out of “your” area because they’re wrecking your carefully staged candids. If your party requires other humans who have every right to be in that space to relocate their entire existence, you need to take a step back and really think about what you’re doing.
The beach, for what it’s worth, plays by slightly different rules than the pool or the park pavilion. There’s no fence, no gate, no single deck everyone’s fighting over—just a very long stretch of sand and occasionally grills and boardwalk access. That’s why a beach bonfire rarely triggers the same fury as a birthday party colonizing the only shaded pavilion in a 2-mile radius: There’s usually somewhere else to put your towel. The exception is when a group tries to rope off a chunk of public shoreline as if it’s a private resort.
The good news is that hosting well in a public space isn’t complicated. It just requires the same manners your mother tried to teach you at age 6: Follow the posted rules (the “no glass, no alcohol, no pets” signs aren’t decorative), actually supervise the kids and the uncle who’s four beers deep at the grill, and clean up every balloon, streamer and scrap of confetti before you leave, because nothing ruins a public park faster than leftover glitter. And if a stranger politely asks you to turn down the music, the correct response is “sure thing,” not a monologue about your rights as a taxpayer.
What to do if a party invades your space
If you’re the one on the receiving end of somebody else’s takeover, give people a little grace first. Most party fouls aren’t malicious—they’re just obliviousness with a bounce house attached, and a polite “Hey, would you mind turning that down?” solves more conflicts than any strongly worded Nextdoor post ever has.
But what if polite doesn’t work? Maybe it’s because the response you get is a shrug (or, worse, attitude), or because the pool is genuinely at capacity and there’s nowhere else for you to go—no other chair, no other patch of shade, no version of this afternoon that doesn’t involve you standing awkwardly at the edge of someone else’s cake table. That’s when you stop negotiating with the host and go straight to whoever’s actually in charge of the space: the lifeguard, the ranger, the person at the front desk or even just the posted phone number for the city. They’re the ones with the authority to enforce capacity limits and posted rules, and frankly, it’s their job, not yours, to be the bad guy. You are never obligated to just quietly evaporate from a public space you have every right to use, even if the person currently hogging it is being a jerk about it.
And you are allowed to call the police, but save that for genuine safety issues, not for airing your grievances about someone’s Spotify playlist. Nobody needs to see that video go viral, least of all you.
The verdict
It is not rude to host a birthday party at a public pool or park. It is rude, however, to behave as though a public space became your private venue the second the balloons went up. The right test isn’t “Did I get here first?” or “Is this technically allowed?” It’s “Could a stranger show up right now and still have a decent afternoon here?”
If the answer is yes, throw your party with joy. If the answer is no, you’ve crossed from celebrating in public to squatting in it, and no amount of cake is going to make that OK.
And if you’re the one standing there, fielding a 60-person rager without a permit and a standoff over whether Fido is actually allowed on the pool deck, well, at least you’re providing great fodder for the next Facebook group meltdown.
Have a social situation you can’t stop ruminating on? Email us at advice@tmbi.com, or message Charlotte on Instagram at @CharlotteHiltonAndersen.
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