Reply to Neighborhood mom upset her daughter was not invited to birthday party

Forum Index » Elementary School-Aged Kids

Reply to "Neighborhood mom upset her daughter was not invited to birthday party"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]This also reminds me of a wedding dilemma common enough that Miss Manners had to address it multiple times (which drilled her position into my head). The letter writer would say something like “Our dream venue (or budget + dream caterer or whatever) only accommodates 60 people, but our minimum guest list is 110. We either have to cut whole family branches or generations or whatever— whom should we cut?” And Miss Manners’ inevitable reply was “Choose a new venue or have cake and punch, you can’t cut for budgetary reasons.”

To be clear, you can decide you want a small wedding, you can elope if you want to, etc. But what she emphasizes you CAN’T do is not invite people you would otherwise invite because of budgetary reasons. You can’t invite your aunt and not your cousin (whose wedding you attended and to whom you are moderately close) simply because that puts you over the guest limit at Fabulous Historic Mansion. You can’t have an appropriate guest list in mind and then start cutting awkwardly because of an arbitrary limit.

I’m not sure OP’s scenario is complete analogous, but it does sound similar enough— like if the budget were higher, she would not have awkwardly excluded this one kid. It would have been substantially different if the birthday girl wanted an intimate 4-guest sleepover and invited all the neighborhood girls in question OR had invited one girl each from different friend groups. But that’s not what she did. [/quote]

I don't see it as the same. Family is family and the mom made sure a cousin was invited.  As another person posted, neighbor girl was obviously not 11th on the list, she was way down in there. The girls play together, but they are not best friends by any means. I just don't get why the mom assumed her child would be invited just because they are neighborhood friends. My daughter plays with 2 girls on our street pretty constantly but is really friends with only one of the two.  She always invites one of them for birthdays and the other girl does the same.  There are levels of friendships, period.  Now, I understand why the girl was hurt, but it is her mom's job to help her understand that she won't be invited to every birthday.  There is no reason to choose the neighbor girl over a good friend on an invitation list. By your description all birthdays should be at cheap venues so that ALL can be accommodated. That's insane. [/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics