A kid's party is notoriously tricky. Fill a location with over excited under 10s, a whole load of cake and sugary drinks: factor in the high probability that the weather will force everyone indoors for at least some of the day; and then add one or two sets of nervous parents, who'd clearly rather be somewhere a little less intimidating. What's to be done? Children's entertainers are a good start. Bring on the clowns, the fancy dress balloon animal making dude and the mini disco, and the whole affair becomes a lot less complicated. 

The thing about children is this: they know their boundaries. They know them, because they've spent the whole of their little lives to date testing them. So, any adult put in charge of a group of kids he or she knows, hasn't a hope. The little loves will have sussed out exactly how far they can go with this one, and that one, years before. 

Children's entertainers, though, are a different proposition. First, they look funny, in their fancy dress (kids are never quite sure what to make of someone whose looks they can't decipher); and second, they are not (barring some kind of staggering coincidence) known to any of the kids at the party. Anyone who has kids, or who has spent any time with kids (or even can remember being one themselves), will tell you: children don't act up in front of adults they don't know. 

That's because they have no reference - no idea where this particular adult's snapping boundary might be. Add to that the fact that when the adults in question are children's entertainers, whose profession involves distracting large groups of over excited boys and girls, one quickly realises that one would be onto a winner even if this cost a million quid. Also: using entertainers frees up the actual parents at a party to do some proper party policing. Every successful child's party owes its success, in some part, to the quality of parental overseeing: stopping a tantrum here, attending to a grazed knee there. 

When party policing is a parent's only job, it tends to go off without a hitch. It's only when parents are expected to be children's entertainers as well as cops that they run into trouble. A person simply can't entertain and police in the same breath. It doesn't work - particularly not when the entertainment/police is known to the children in question. That would be like the village Bobby doing a song and dance routine and buying you a drink before arresting you. 

A successful kid's party, then, is all about planning - about separating the executive and legislative bodies, as it were, so that a strike at both can never occur. Good children's entertainers are organisational gold, offering the mums and dads free rein to get on with the food, the drink and the molly coddling. Between the two arms of state, the entertainment and the police, one can expect to thrash out the kind of child's bash one might even enjoy - just a little - oneself. 

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