New Zealand's Children's Day is a national, non-commercial day to celebrate how special and important our children are.

Children's Day 2010 will be a special celebration.  It will mark the 10th anniversary of national Children's Day in Aotearoa!

It will be celebrated on Sunday 7 March 2010 and our theme will be Praise and Encouragement.

So to start this theme, we praise our many event organisers who helped us have over 300 events to celebrate Children's Day nationwide and we encourage you all to think about what you might do to celebrate Children's Day next year.

Children's Day on March 1st this year was very busy.  Soon our website will be updated with some of the great stories from the families and children who attended these entertaining events nationwide. 

Some were huge - think Timaru, Christchurch and Waitakere, that attracted 5000, 8,000 and 11,000 respectively.  But most of them were medium and small, from groups of 10 or so people right through to about 500 people.

The stories and information we have gained from an e-survey completed in May this year will be included when we refresh this website in the next few months. But most of the stories reflect the importance of that special gift – the gift of time adults can share with children.

A big thank you once again to the hundreds of event organisers and volunteers who put in thousands of hours of their time and creativity to organise Children’s Day events.

We are sure fabulous events will be organised for 2010 and via our e-letters and updates hope to give you heaps of ideas to make 2010 a very special year indeed.

This website contains information and inspiration to help you celebrate Children's Day.

Stars Speak

Hear what New Zealand celebrities have to say about their childhood memories!

Throughout this site you will see our fun Children's Day characters (PDF 421KB): Ben, Kate, Rua, Jess and Patch the dog. They are busy deciding on what they will be doing on Children's Day, have you decided what you are going to do yet?