When do people stop inviting the whole class to birthday parties and how does that go?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I have a 2nd grade boy and Kindergarten girl this year. Last year when my son was in 1st grade, he was invited to 3 whole class bday parties and 4-5 other parties that were a smaller group of kids invited (like 5-6 kids from the class, but never all the boys in the class). Before that, there were no bday parties when he was in K due to the pandemic. The parties he was invited to in pre-k from his classmates were all whole class parties.

My daughter last year in pre-K also all the parties were for the whole class but this year in K she's been to 2 parties that were just a small group of friends so I think it just depends on the specific group of kids!

Personally, I haven't and wouldn't host a whole class party. My kids invite only their closest friends. I want to be inclusive and hate to leave kids out or make them sad but at the same time I just can't handle the stress of a whole class party and they're overwhelming and not fun for my kids (both of whom are more introverted type kids who don't like large groups) either so we don't do them. We just emphasize strongly to our kids not to talk about their bday party at school/around other kids...I'm sure sometimes they do--they're kids and kids talk. But we try to make sure they understand that someone may get hurt feelings if they hear it and I think my kids are sensitive enough to understand that for the most part.

For your younger child in K, do you just ask her which 4-5 friends she wants to invite? For my kid I think that would change by the day or he would just randomly list some kids from the bus. Do you use whatever list she gives you?

[Anonymous]

I have a 3rd grader and a 1st grader. The 1st grader has had mostly whole-class birthday parties so far, though there was one with just a few special friends from the class.
By third grade, my observation is that girls sometimes have girls-only parties, but boys still have whole-class parties.

[Anonymous]

We did whole class last year (1st) and select list this year (2nd), but it was a function of venue vs age. Last year was outside at a park, this year at one of those indoor play places. If we were at a park again we would have invited everyone. I just didn't want to do the work of putting a park party together, it's easier to just pay the place and show up.

[Anonymous]

My kids have only been to a few 'whole class parties' and we have never hosted one ourselves. One of them was in the summer (right after the school year ended) at a park and very low key and almost all the parents and siblings came too. The other 2 I'm pretty sure the kids invited the whole class because they didn't have any close friends to invite because both the kids who had those parties were new to the school and/or kind of shy, quiet kids. So maybe their parents did that as a way to meet people.

In some ways it seems nice to invite the whole class (no one is left out, kids might wind up becoming closer friends w/ someone they didn't know before, parents often stay so parents get to know each other, etc. plus you don't have to worry not enough people will come!) but for the most part it seems so overwhelming to me--as a parent host and as a birthday kid!

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I have a 2nd grade boy and Kindergarten girl this year. Last year when my son was in 1st grade, he was invited to 3 whole class bday parties and 4-5 other parties that were a smaller group of kids invited (like 5-6 kids from the class, but never all the boys in the class). Before that, there were no bday parties when he was in K due to the pandemic. The parties he was invited to in pre-k from his classmates were all whole class parties.

My daughter last year in pre-K also all the parties were for the whole class but this year in K she's been to 2 parties that were just a small group of friends so I think it just depends on the specific group of kids!

Personally, I haven't and wouldn't host a whole class party. My kids invite only their closest friends. I want to be inclusive and hate to leave kids out or make them sad but at the same time I just can't handle the stress of a whole class party and they're overwhelming and not fun for my kids (both of whom are more introverted type kids who don't like large groups) either so we don't do them. We just emphasize strongly to our kids not to talk about their bday party at school/around other kids...I'm sure sometimes they do--they're kids and kids talk. But we try to make sure they understand that someone may get hurt feelings if they hear it and I think my kids are sensitive enough to understand that for the most part.

For your younger child in K, do you just ask her which 4-5 friends she wants to invite? For my kid I think that would change by the day or he would just randomly list some kids from the bus. Do you use whatever list she gives you?

Well, my daughter is very shy/quiet and she has her little group of really close friends that she doesn't branch out from much. She often has play dates w/ the same 3-4 kids over and over so I obviously know all the parents making it actually pretty easy for me to know who to invite. It's actually harder for my older kid to make his invite list because his friend group is larger and changes more often but my daughter's friend group has been steady for the past year or so, kids she was in both pre-k and now K w/.

[Anonymous]

My kid is turning 11 and still wants to invite a billion people. So I will let you know lol.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:A lot of people in K just invite all the boys or all the girls. There are no hurt feelings in that case.

I dislike this because it just reinforces the idea of same-sex friendships which I think is negative in the longterm. I'd rather my kid be left out of some parties as the invitation lists shrink then have a culture where kids are told that friendships are always supposed to be same-sex. It just doesn't reflect how friendships/relationships work in adulthood and contributes to misogyny by teaching boys, in particular, that they don't need to be friendly with girls or treat them as equals.

I have a girl and she gravitates to female friendships but she has made friends with a number of boys in early elementary and we nurture those friendships too and would totally invite those boys to her birthday. They might choose not to come or they might come and decide to leave early if they aren't into the same stuff DD is into (unicorns and mermaids) which is totally okay. But I wouldn't just exclude them because they are boys.

It's not that the kids are only friends with all the boys or girls, but what happens in my experience is my kids are friends with a group of 5 or 6 boys or girls and really just want to invite those kids but then that leaves out a few of the boys or girls so to keep the peace we just invite all of them. Like my son is friends with half the boys in class and rather than exclude a few we invite all the boys, same for my daughter who may be friends with half the girls so we invite all, just in case. They may be cordial with the opposite sex but not friendly enough to want to invite them to their parties.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:My kid is turning 11 and still wants to invite a billion people. So I will let you know lol.

Same, but my daughter doesn’t want to invite everyone in the class. She invites actual friends. We only invited the entire class for either kid in preK. In elementary, our son may have invited all of the boys for a couple of years and then it got smaller. It was fine. Our daughter always wanted to invite a lot of kids but it was never just the class. It may have been everyone in Girl Scouts and on the soccer team in the early years.

Cut down the numbers. It’s okay.

[Anonymous]

My second grader has only been invited to 2 whole-class parties. Both at SkyZone.

All the other parties he's been invited to have been at homes and just a few people were invited, including at the birthday party we held last year.

[Anonymous]

We never did whole class parties. I have four kids (including my brother's biological children who I adopted when they were tweens) and it was never in our budget. We let the kids invite a few friends each for a home party.

[Anonymous]

We go to a public school in Fairfax, and we've never once been invited to a class-wide party, not even in Kindergarten. In our experience, those ended in preschool.

[Anonymous]

My daughter is in 3rd and we are inviting only the girls in class and then her stray friends from aftercare/neighborhood. She doesn’t think all the girls in class will show and I don’t either but I don’t want 4-5 of them to get an invite or attend and then talk about it at school in front of girls who didn’t.

[Anonymous]

For my oldest we had a whole class party in pre-K, just the girls in class for 2nd grade (plus a couple extra friends from camp), and now in 5th, just a handful of close friends (a couple from school, a couple from neighborhood/camp). They've all been outside our home since we live in a tiny place.

[Anonymous]

In k. We only had whole class through preschool.

[Anonymous]

I have a 1st grader and this is the first year that we have started to get invites for smaller parties (either just girls or a few friends). I'm still doing a whole class party because she's friends with both boys and girls and her class is small enough that we can manage (13 kids). I asked her this morning who she liked playing with best and she said everybody so I don't think we're at the stage where we can just do 4-5 kids.