My son is turning six in a few months and I have noticed this year that some parents are not inviting the whole class to parties, as in prior years. (He is in Kindergarten and he has been there since PK3). I am still of the mindset that they are so young that I do not want to exclude anyone.
However, my son recently had an incident (at another birthday party) where a kid with some behavioral issues (not terrible, he’s more aggressive than the other children, can’t keep him hands to himself) crashed into him and accidentally broke my son’s arm. I never heard from the child’s parents but the child himself apologized when they got back to school (it happened over the holiday break) and my son accepted his apology.
Now my son says that he does not want to invite this particular child to his birthday party. I said OK. Then we went over the class list and there is another child that he does not want to invite because she twisted his finger (another somewhat aggressive child who seems to have some issues with biting and hitting). I said OK again but feel badly about excluding 2 kids out of 18. (We are having the party at our house and can have as many kids as we want).
I have seen him in action with both of the kids and they are friendly. Both seem to be basically good kids. On one hand, I feel that it should be his choice who he wants at his party, ESPECIALLY when both kids in question have been aggressive with him. On the other hand, they are 5 and 6, and maybe I should not let him make this decision when it can cause hurt feelings that he may not understand the decision will cause.
I am really at a loss as to what to do and am curious as to what others would do.
Excluding 2 out of 18 kids in the same class seems like a harsh thing to lay on a 5 year-old. I’d either bite the bullet and invite all of them or keep the party small and tell your son to only invite 4-5 kids.
In this case, I think you should invite the whole class. Not that I think everyone should be included just in case some little darling’s feelings get hurt… but not inviting two people out of the whole class might create problems down the line. Just think about the two kids that didn’t go to the party but have to endure the other kids talking about it. While your kid has the right to have whoever he wants at his party, at the age of six, it’s a better opportunity for you to teach him to get to know people better, and give them second chances.
Now, if you were talking about inviting five children out of that class, that would be different.
A second chance? WTF, you want the kid to get his OTHER arm broken? Note that I would not be passing out invitations at school, either. Mail them to the invited kids.
Did you read the part in the OP where it was an accident? They’re kids, accidents happen. I place more blame on the parents not keeping an eye and making sure that it didn’t go from rowdy to reckless.
Believe me, I am not taking my son’s broken arm lightly. It was a traumatic event (more for me than for him, I think). However, it was an accident. Granted, the accident may not have happened if that particular child were better behaved, but it was still an accident. If he were to be at the party, we will watch him very closely (part of the issue is that whoever takes him to parties doesn’t supervise) and ask him/them to leave if he starts acting up. Period.
Your kid does not want him there. With damn fine reason. Maybe he’s afraid of the arm breaker. Maybe he’s mad about getting his arm broken. Whatever. The kid has known behavior problems. Why take a chance?
I thought a good rule of thumb is to invite as many kids as the age your kid is turning. So, five or six other kids should be at the party if you’re not going to invite the whole class. At six, a kid is old enough to choose his own friends.
And IF you’re not going to include the whole class, just distribute the invitations outside of school.
Otherwise this rule should apply to everybody. If you invite more than half of a group to something, you have to invite the rest. Maybe there’s a better way to quantify the cricitical proportion, but if you don’t do that it’s an intentional insult, and reflects badly on you in the case of a parent.
Of course I intentionally insult people all the time. I don’t do everything I should do.
So there are two kids that your son does not want to invite. What about all of the others? Is it the case that necessarily “wants” all of them at his party, or is it just that he doesn’t “not want” the others? Is he close friends with everyone in his class, or are there a handful of kids that he’s particularly close to?
If it were me, I’d have him pick 5 or 6 classmates. But I personally wouldn’t want 18 6-year olds running around my house…it would drive me nuts…
It is that he doesn’t want the two, not that he particularly wants the other 15. I think if I limited it to nine, he would pick out who he really wants, and that probably is the way it should be anyway.
Your Honor, I object to this line of questioning on the grounds that it is leading the witness.
Sustained.
Ok, little kids get hurt sometimes by other kids. I wouldn’t be too happy about a broken arm on one of my snowflakes either but they sound like decent kids that had something unfortunate happen and it hurts both of them. As stated before, you can either have a small party with just a few selected friends from the class or invite the whole class. That is proper etiquette for a small child’s birthday party.
You may be able to invite all the people you want to your own home but do you really want to. After you send out 18 invitations you have to deal with 19 Kindergartners running all over your home and keeping them all entertained. There are very few games that work for a group that large and it limits other things as well.
I would let your son invite the kids he actively wants to invite. That means let him invite his friends and that’s it. Usually with a kid that age it will be somewhere between five and 10 kids. I make my kids stick to a number very close to whatever age they are turning, so a six year old would get about six friends at a party. (I loosen the rule for my kids when they have a larger group of friends so no one they really like gets left out.) Works well and it allows me to not be as stressed and do a wider variety of activities at the party.
My daughter just turned eight. We’ve been inviting all the girls from her class to her birthday party each year and a few others in the neighborhood her age. If it’s really a problem then tell him the party is small and he can only invite a few people. We don’t have a finished basement so I hold her birthday parties in other places. This year we’ll be at the local library on Saturday to celebrate with her friends. Other parents around here also do this. My daughter has been to parties everywhere from stores at the mall to the pool at the local WMHA. It’s typically about $10 to $15 a head. In turn places provide pizza, cake, decorations, supervised activities and clean up.
