She promised her friends it would be “the best party ever”, and that was no idle boast: when Anna Abram-ovich threw a bash last week for 500 schoolchildren, she blew enough cash to buy a decent-sized house.

Of course, when daddy is the billionaire oligarch Roman Abramo-vich – worth £11.7 billion – a few hundred thousand is neither here nor there. Not when your precious daughter is about to turn 16 and wants to set a new benchmark in teenage parties.

Informal invitations to Anna’s do – at a nightclub in London’s West End – were sent out on Facebook in January. Then, just five days before the event, glossy black envelopes containing silver cards embossed with Anna’s initials started to be handed out. At around the same time, all the girls who had been invited received a bracelet jangling with silver and crystal charms, while the boys were given a beaded black leather strap, designed by Anna.

At the club itself, only those wearing the bracelets were admitted. Guests then had to file past a metal detector and hand in the batteries of their mobile phones (which were filed in numbered plastic bags) before stepping on to an illuminated dancefloor that was surrounded by bodyguards.

“The club was amazing,” says Olivia, 15, a partygoer. “Everything had a pink, black and white theme and Anna’s initials were everywhere. There was a special area where you could have your picture taken with friends – where they had make-up artists and sunglasses and guitars.”

Music was courtesy of the Mercury prize-winning Klaxons, and the Brazilian funksters CSS; the DJ was the television presenter Alexa Chung. Two bars offered nonalcoholic cocktails and the tables were stacked with marshmallows, chocolate-dipped strawberries, cakes and sweets – all coloured pink or black.

“Dress to impress,” Anna had told her friends – and she herself wore a Dior couture orange dress – the only one in the country. Like a celebrity, she spent much of the night – which ended at 3am – in a VIP lounge with about two dozen of her closest friends and the band members.

“I will never forget that party,” says a classmate, whose father gave her £200 to spend on a dress for the occasion. “I wear my bracelet every day, just so that when people ask about it, I can say I went to Anna’s party. Pretty much every teen in west London and beyond knows about it.”

They may have enjoyed it – but when it comes to their own 16th birthday celebrations, how will the rest of Anna’s classmates at Godolphin and Latymer school follow suit? Not, one imagines, with tea and a goody bag containing a slice of homemade cake wrapped in a soggy napkin.

Today’s generation of competitive – and well-heeled – parents are dipping ever deeper into their pockets to ensure that their children have the best birthday that money can buy. One family in Gloucestershire spent £20,000 on a Willy Wonka party for 30 children, complete with a troupe of Oompa-Loompas and three chocolate fountains. Another organised a football tournament, for which they hired professional coaches, and one parent flew a West End musical star across Europe to sing Happy Birthday to a beaming 13-year-old.

Even for children much younger than Anna, at-home birthday parties are becoming a rarity; those with the cash prefer to shell out for professionally organised events in hired venues.

Cassandra Jardine, mother of five and author of How to Be a Better Parent, feels that there’s nothing wrong in her children attending the occasional extravaganza, as long as they don’t expect her to reciprocate.

“My 13-year-old daughter was invited with others to Disneyland Paris for the weekend and put up in some wonderful hotel, with every possible treat and loveliness thrown in – including first-class seats on Euros-tar,” she says. And a friend of her 14-year-old daughter, Dido, has been talking about taking them off to Dubai for a birthday. “I just hope they take them to the beach and not to the shopping mall,” says Jardine.

She doesn’t mind her children being whisked away every now and then, but adds: “We don’t have the kind of money to be able to reciprocate and, even if we did, I don’t think we would. I also think that if you are used to having thousands spent on your birthday as a child, then it’s going to be pretty downhill once you’re independent. You will end up thinking that the best days of your life were spent at home.”

But are such parties really all about the children? Or is their special day in some ways being hijacked by pushy parents playing a game of social one-upmanship? A survey by American Express found that one in 10 parents admitted throwing parties just to impress other parents – and that the average family spends £450 every year on birthday celebrations.

What is more, over-the-top parties, according to child psychologist Ruth Coppard, give children an unrealistic view of their own importance.

“It isn’t helpful for children to believe that their every wish is important, because not many other people are going to agree with them,” she says. “It’s misleading for the young person concerned and it’s also socially divisive.”

Some names have been changed

Additional reporting by Amanda Blinkhorn

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