Gender Reveal Parties are a practice that has been growing in popularity in the United States for years. The tradition of throwing a party to reveal your baby’s gender seems to have no sign of stopping. The only question is, why?

It is considerably difficult to find someone who’d rather attend one of these parties than just being told over text, and in this day and age where everyone has to one-up everyone else, these parties can even become dangerous.

Right off the bat, gender reveal parties seem to have no real purpose. Not only does no one like attending them, but it is inconvenient for everyone involved. No matter how you reveal the gender of your baby, a text message would have the exact same impact on your family member or close friend.

The only thing a gender reveal party does is wasting the time of others. There is no reason for this to be a trend, nothing is gained from it other than perhaps self-gratification and feeding your own ego as a soon-to-be parent. Which only leads to the common process of one-upping. Gender reveal parties at their core are an attention contest for which parents can have the craziest reveal, which leads to the next major problem with this kind of party: Death.

Death has a stronger connection with gender reveal parties than one might think. Just this year alone, three people have died at a gender reveal party. Three people have died for attending a pointless event. In efforts to make their party wild or unique, their parties ended in death.

One of those deaths was the result of a bomb meant to explode in blue or pink smoke setting off early and killing a man. The other two were a pilot and copilot who were hired to do an entire air show over a lake and spell out girl or boy, which ended up crashing.

These spectacular ideas from the parents to win the contest of egos led to the deaths of these individuals. No matter what way it is looked at, they died for nothing, they died because they partook in something that has no reason to still be a thing.

However, a gender reveal party doesn’t have to end in death to be a complete disaster. On April 20th, to reveal the gender of their baby, 80 pounds of Tannerite, a legal explosive, was detonated in New Hampshire. The resulting explosion led to tremors that resembled that of an earthquake that could be felt multiple towns over. While this explosion led to no reported injuries, it caused cracks in the infrastructure of many homes and turned the local tap water brown, among other things.

This event alone should be enough to show how pointless gender reveal parties are, not to mention the fact that last year’s wildfire in California was caused by a gender reveal party as well.

Overall, gender reveal parties have absolutely no positives for existing and have directly led to things that shouldn’t even be associated with them. Gender reveal parties have been flawed from the start and they’re even more flawed now. It’s time for the tradition to die.