Reply to Is it ok to host a birthday party but only ask a few of the kids to sleep over?

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Reply to "Is it ok to host a birthday party but only ask a few of the kids to sleep over?"

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]

This is one of those threads that has revealed way more about people than was intended, it's quite fascinating. I thought it was a simple question but obviously it's not.

It seems that the many, many people who are taking the original question as an affront, describing my daughter as 'mean' and 'unkind', calling her a 'jerk' and a 'brat,' who think that she's inviting her wider circle friends out of 'pity' or because she wants to 'grab gifts' and 'throw them crumbs,' who think that she's not 'really friends' with them because they can't stay for the sleepover (out of  space/logistical reasons, not out of any malice) have a definition of social relationships that I've never encountered in real life before. At first I thought they had a point,  but as the attacks piled on, I realized that these posters simply have a world view that's very different from mine.  DD and I don't view friendships as competitions and we don't think parties are battles for attention. My daughter and I consider friendships to be a natural, fun, part of life -- sometimes you make friends, sometimes you lose friends, you have close friends, you have not-so-close friends and you have acquaintances that you chat with occasionally on the street. When you have a party, you invite as many people as you can comfortably fit into your living room, and when you have a sleepover, you invite the number that will fit on sleeping bags on the floor. All the other assumptions of ill intent and expressions of envy are really misplaced in this debate. Anyway, we haven't made a decision yet on how we'll proceed. This thread has given me a lot of food for thought.[/quote]
OP, here is your  takeaway.  You and your daughter's approach is generally fine, but there are people (as exhibited by this post) who will be insulted and hurt at being asked to come to the party but not the sleepover.  If you want to make sure not to insult or hurt those people, have the sleepover on a different day.  If you do not care that some people may be insulted and hurt, carry on with the sleepover on the same day.  That's it.  You do not have to agree with those people.  But now you know they exist.[/quote]

OP here. This is a very reasonable summary, thanks for breathing some perspective into this thread. [/quote]

I think there was plenty of perspective on the thread before.  Some people went a little over the top, but many people just pointed out that some girls are likely to have their feelings hurt.  And I don't view my kid's birthday as an opportunity to teach *others kids* that life isn't fair, they won't be invited to everything, so they need to suck it up and grow a thick skin.  It's not my job or her job to do that.  I view it as an opportunity to teach *my* daughter about being a gracious host, about considering others' feelings, and about being kind.  You don't have to invite everyone to everything.  But the way that you handle it should be kind.  Inviting people, and then sending half of them home part way through, seems to me to be meaningfully different from only inviting half the girls in the first place, and it seems unnecessarily unkind and likely to cause hurt feelings.  So I would not let my daughter do that, and we would talk about why. [/quote]

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