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[quote=Anonymous]OP, I'm sorry you've had these experiences - it's hard to feel excluded.

We are sort of on the other end of the situation in that my formerly quiet and shy dd has come into her own a bit and has been invited to a good number of parties this year (I think around 15), all on the smaller side (10 or fewer guests). She has also been invited to play dates with people whose birthdays she was not invited to.

For her summer birthday, she wants a home party with her 5 favorite friends. I offered up to 10 but she decided on the smaller group to share the special occasion because she said the bigger groups got a bit overwhelming to her and she'd rather spread friend time out over play dates. In any case, even if she maxed out the number I offered to her, she would still have left out at least 1/3 of the people whose parties she had attended.

She's so grateful for all of those friends and really does love spending time with them. For her post-prek birthdays though, she's tended to go quite small, one year only inviting one person and the others the collection of her very closest people, and is definitely not an indication of not caring very much for the rest of her social circle. I know it would bother her a lot to know that someone was crushed to not be included.

She knows not to discuss it at school though - by 3rd grade the kids seem to have gotten savvier about being discreet.

Does your son have a bestie or two, like where they mutually agree they are each others' favorites?

And I hear you re reciprocating, too. I've been on both sides of that. On the one hand, we are the nearly exclusive hosts of my dd's best friend. I can count on one hand the number of times she's been invited to their home over the course of several years, but that child frequently comes to our house for play dates and sleepovers. They are great together, so I am okay with it - the family must have their reasons for not hosting more. On the other hand, dd's gotten close to a couple of other kids this year who keep asking her over to play and I just don't have the free weekend days to reciprocate as much as they invite, and school nights are too hard. I feel guilty about it, but don't have a great solution other than hosting the occasional group of them (basically a mini party) to catch up on a few at once. I take my hat off to more organized or extroverted parents who are better at juggling this.

In our case, as others have said, a lot more invitations started coming in for both play dates and parties when DH and I befriended parents. The kids are still usually the ones who pick who are coming to parties, but for some reason parents being friends seems to make a difference, at least at my child's school.

I'm really shy and pretty socially awkward and possibly came off as standoffish at first, but the more I connected with other parents, the more my daughter started getting included in stuff.[/quote]

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