We’ve never done this. It sounds crazy. Why would people come from out of town for a birthday party?

We always do. But we only have grandparents and one sibling. Both sets of grandparents fly and drive in as well as sibling. It’s a lot and feeding everyone does get to be too much.

I can’t wait until all birthdays are drop off and then the other parents aren’t there too

13, but we're Jewish, so....

Think about what you and the kid will want to do at the party, and invite family to that party or not. Maybe have 2 parties. Maybe just have them over for dinner or go out for dinner or an activity.

Any reason to get together is great. There are eno formal plot.

You have two parties. We never mixed kid friends (couple of hours, bounce houses whatever) with a family barbecue held near the child’s birthday and if possible between a bunch of family birthdays. We had several birthdays at the end of May, so one of the weekends was the party for me, my dad, my aunt, and a cousin. Of course the biggest deal was made around the kids whose birthday it was.

So invite family when you want a family get together. No one, however, should be planning to overnight. You should be in driving distance (except for a regularly scheduled grandparent visit)

We never invited out of town family to our kid parties and we didn’t travel for family kid birthday parties.

We never did.

Only if they are the child’s grandparents would I invite them.

One

I wouldn't invite them to the children's party. If you want to have a separate family party that's up to you. My kids b'days are 2 weeks apart so we usually had a family party in between for both because grandparents and aunts wanted to join. I think that stopped by 6ish for the older one.

My kids are teens. The out of town grandparents still come because their birthdays are 6 months apart and it's a good time to visit. When they had friend parties, we had that on a different weekend and grandparents didn't come. No other out of town relatives have ever come for birthdays, even when they were little.

It would never occur to me to invite out of town family. If they’re visiting over a birthday maybe they’d be included in the family celebration but it shouldn’t be a party or anything.

We have never done this.

Um, we never invite out of town family to a kids birthday party.

I would say, not being born in this country the over the top birthday culture seems a bit insane to my family.

When they have friends to invite.

DD is turning four this summer. We invited DHs out of town family to her first birthday party, but we haven’t had a “proper” birthday party since then, as she was at home with me, but now she goes to preschool and has friends that she wants to invite. If I’m being honest, I don’t really want to invite DHs out of town family, as it’ll be a hassle having to host them, etc, but I know they’re expecting it, especially since BIL (DHs brother) has invited DHs family to our nephews bday parties his entire life (he’s 6).