Kid Friendly New Year’s Eve

It’s New Year’s Eve, but you know your children will never make it to midnight. Mine still haven’t and our oldest is 11. There are still fun ways to ring in the New Year without the pressure of trying to keep your children awake or having super tired children the next day. So how do you celebrate the New Year’s with children who won’t last all night? Here’s what we do!

New Year’s with Children Throughout the Day

Our New Year’s celebration with kids actually begins in the morning. We spend the morning of New Year’s Eve focused on reflection of the year past. As we reflect, we love to think about the future too! Our reflection usually brings us to our resolution and wishes for the new year.

Our New Year’s Reflection with Children

1. We love to reflect on the year that is ending. Pick a few different moments to reflection on. Our kids love to share their proudest moment, best moment, funniest moment, and biggest achievement from the last year.
2. It can also be fun to share your most embarrassing moment, most challenging moment, or even the best advice your learned from the last year. These moments help us to begin to think about our resolutions and wishes for the new year.
3. We love to create a visual of our year’s reflections. This can be as simple as a large pieces of easel pad paper. If you are feeling more crafty, you could use 2 or 4 sheets of paper to cut out the numbers in the year you are ending today. Then let your family write their reflections on the numbers.
4. As we write our reflections, we love to use post-it notes. This lets us easily group our family reflections together and look for common themes. Sometimes one person’s proudest moment is another person’s biggest struggle. Other times we notice that we all loved the same trip or experience.
5. If you are feeling extra adventurous, try a wordle. We love to turn all our post-it notes into a printable and downloadable visual word cloud. These are so fun to look at from year to year and remember some of our favorites and some lessons we learned.

Kid-Friendly New Year’s Resolutions and Wishes

1. Write a wish for the next year to come. These really can be anything each person of your family wants to happen next year. Sometimes these are wishes for a trip like going to Disney World. They can be more personal wishes to, like improving my communication or controlling my anger. Then can even be event specific wishes, like making a specific team or starting a club.
2. Once everyone has a wish, it’s time to think about what to do with those wishes. You can display their wishes, but you definitely don’t have to display the wishes either. It can also be fun to burn the wishes to release them into the world. Our kids like to keep their wishes personal like a birthday wish, so we don’t actually share them. If you have a Christmas tree, you could even decorate your tree with your wishes. This is great because you could have your children help taking down the decorations as they put up their wishes which can more easily be removed from the tree.
3. Write a New Year’s resolution. We like to each write a personal resolution and together write a family resolution that we all can work on together. These are best to be displayed so everyone can help each other to keep on track. It can be extremely easy to forget these resolutions a few days after the new year begins.

Organize Your Year

1. New Year’s Eve is a wonderful time for your children to go through what they have that they no long need or want. They can find a few things to donate to others for the new year. As you find places for all their new holiday gifts, you can begin a basket for toys we can donate or sell. Such a simple way to start of the year with their best foot forward.
2. We love to use part of New Year’s Eve to go through their clothes too! Maybe your child just had a growth spurt, maybe they will find they need some additional clothes, or maybe they will find something they no longer love. Either way, going through the clothes helps to eliminate clutter, especially clothes they haven’t worn all school year yet. Additionally, if they need to replace anything, you can put those gift cards and cash gifts to good use right away by purchasing things your children need, not only want.
3. We take so many pictures throughout the year, New Year’s Eve can become a perfect time to create a year in review scrapbook or even photo book together as a family. The kids are really great a choosing photos and even writing captions or creating layouts. We love making these digitally, but you could also make them as a hardcopy too. For us, we open a shared Google Drive photo on each computer or tablet. Then we let our kids add pictures to the folder so we can start building our digital scrapbook. Plus it’s a great family bonding activity and a trip down memory lane too!

At Night on New Year’s with Children

New Year’s with children isn’t complete without a special night. However, when your children cannot actually stay awake until midnight, New Year’s Eve can get skipped. Instead of waiting until midnight, celebrate the New Year whenever it is getting close to the time your children need to sleep. There is no rule that you have to wait until the actual new year to celebrate! Make your own tradition and celebrate when it works for your family.

Even if your kids are able to stay up until midnight, you might have a younger one who can’t make it. So why not plan a family celebration at an earlier time to include everyone. Then have a special celebration at midnight for those children who are able to stay awake. You really can make your New Year’s celebration with kids anything that works best for your family.

Getting Ready to Celebrate the New Year

1. Watch the New Year roll over in another country to give yourself a countdown and celebrate the New Year together. We love to watch the New Year count down in different parts of Europe depending on how long our kids can stay awake. Just do a little google search to see what country is celebrating the New Year about the time you want to put the kids to bed. If nothing else, find a New Year’s celebration on YouTube or Netflix to watch. We have even watched the ball drop from the year prior when we can’t find anything else.
2. A photo booth is always fun too! Get all dressed up in your fancy clothes, have some fun props to try on, and create a backdrop to take some silly photos in front of together as a family or individually. A sheet can become a great backdrop. Just add the year or New Years onto the sheet using some double sided tape. My kids love hats, scarfs, and glasses as props. Most of these we just happen to have around the house, but many dollar stores have some great cheap options too! Your visual reflections can make an amazing back drop here!
3. If you are all dressed up for the photo booth, you could host a fancy dinner at home. Set up a fancy table and pull out your china for the evening. Make some simple but fancy finger foods to serve for dinner. Be sure to include some of your kids favorite meals in bite size form. We love to make mac and cheese cups, lasagna rolls, and meatballs. You could even serve your dinner in courses and ask your children to be the servers to give the parents a special meal too.

Extra Fun for New Year’s with Children

Now that your children are fed, dressed up, and ready for the New Year’s Eve celebration, it’s time to add more fun! Think about the actual few minutes leading up to the countdown and what you will actually do right after the “New Year” begins no matter the time you are celebrating.

Plan for New Year’s Treats

Buy a few fun treats for your children or make them together! This can be a great opportunity to let your children figure out what they would like to serve for their party. Think of a special drink and a snack.

We love to get some sparkling grape juice or apple cider for our fancy drink. We pull out the fancy champagne flutes and let our children have a special fancy drink when we celebrate.

Our kids also love to decorate cupcakes and cookies. So we tend to set up a cupcake or cookie bar with lots of toppings for them to decorate. It’s always fun when you make the cookies into number shapes for the New Year too! You can also buy number sprinkles or use frosting to add the year too.

For an extra special treat, you can add ice cream to your sparkling apple cider or cookies and cupcakes.

Glow in the Dark New Year’s with Children Fun

Spice up the night with some glow sticks for your children. This can be the perfect time to reuse or use up the glow items from the 4th of July.

If your children aren’t used to staying up late, it can be lots of fun to play in the dark. Our children are so used to going to bed when it gets dark, that they don’t usually get to many nights to enjoy. So let them enjoy the dark and play add an element of light for their fun. Glow sticks, necklaces, and bracelets can add so much fun. You can also add in glow in the dark balls or use flashlights too.

New Year’s Eve Noisemakers and Confetti

Noisemakers and confetti can be fun too! But only if you find these fun. If you find the noisemakers annoying and hate to clean up confetti, skip this and find a different way to have fun on New Year’s with children.

Our kids love noisemakers and we do them some years and not others. For us, it really depends on how much the adults are willing to listen to the noise. You can buy the tradition New Year’s Eve noisemakers or make your own. We love to use paper plates folded in half or empty cardboard paper towel or toilet paper rolls to make noise makers with our kids.

And confetti is always a favorite. We put the confetti into a sensory bin for the kids to pop into the bin and then play with it inside the bin. This tends to keep the mess to a minimum since I don’t want to be finding confetti all over my house for the next year. If we notice that the confetti is getting out of hand, we lay an old sheet or tarp under the sensory table to catch as much as possible.

Balloon Drop

Our kids are obsessed with balloons. They love everything about balloons and especially enjoy games with balloons. You can make your own balloon drop to use at home right around the time you want to celebrate the New Year with children.

We like to make our balloon drop count the last 10 minutes instead of drop all at once, but you really can do either. For a countdown balloon drop, fill each balloon with something fun for the kids. Some years we have added treats to the balloons, while other years we put phrases in them. If you choose to add treats or phrases, your children will delight in getting to pop the balloons. Be sure to number the balloons for each minute so your children can anticipate what is to come.

Treats

On years when we choose to use treats, we find that wrapped candy works best. We try to include enough pieces so each child can receive the same amount once the balloon is popped. However, you could always add small toys like stuffed animals or figurines. We have also had some luck with fidget toys.

Phrases

There are many different options if you want to try phrases in the balloons too. We love adding some silly activities for the kids to do for the minute. These can be simple exercises, short games, or even poses to try. You could match these with a favorite song or playlist from the year. Another option is to write phrases that will spell out something special that you will do this year.

Take a moment to reflect on your last year. Read about our reflects in our post Beginning 2021. If you found these activities and suggestions helpful, please drop us a comment below and let us know. Want more learning and fun activities to do with your kids, be sure to subscribe to our newsletter.

Hi, I’m Nicole.

Here at Creatingbutterflies we provide families with practical solutions to real life problems for everything parenting, scouting, dual language, and enjoying time outdoors. We are a family of 6 with 4 wonderful becoming bilingual children who loves scouting, camping, and hiking with their family. Mom is an educator and dad is a firefighter/paramedic.