Birthday Parties

Once your child is of school age, it begins to happen.

Not the inevitable mountain of homework, but the Birthday Party Invitations.

For my daughter, the party invitations started arriving as early as pre-school. For both of my kids, the invitations continued with a steady flourish from about kindergarten on.

What's a parent to do?

You want your child to be social. You want your child to have good experiences interacting with other people. What you don't want is to be going broke while your child brings a gift to every party he/she is invited to.

When I was a kid, back in the dark ages, party invitations could be handed out at school - as discreetly as possible, because mom insisted you could invite only five children. So you'd corner your friends at recess and smuggle a grubby envelope with a childishly scrawled name upon it, and furtively giggling, the envelope would then be smuggled into a lunch box or a coat pocket, to be carried home.

Or, parents would mail the invitations to the children's homes. And you were told not to talk about your party at school, in front of other kids who weren't invited, because it would be rude and hurt their feelings.

These days, schools have their own policies for dealing with birthday parties. Evidently, small lessons in discrection haven't been learned by everyone.

Let's face it. Kids will be kids, and despite their best intentions, they sometimes say or do things that are perceived as rudeness by others. The child didn't mean anything by it, it just "happened." We've all "been there, done that" when it comes to this sort of situation.

"Well now little Susie, how do you like grandma's new dress?"

"Grandma, that makes you look like BARNEY!" No doubt, Barney is little Susie's most beloved television character, but being compared to a purple dinosaur is probably not what grandma was hoping for.

Anyway.

Some schools have this policy regarding party invitations:

• If you distribute invitations at school, either invite the whole class
• or invite just the boys (if you're a boy)
• or invite just the girls (if you're a girl)
• If you don't want to invite the whole class, then MAIL your invitations

The reasoning behind this is to avoid hurt feelings.
I can understand this to an extent, because at some point there is a cut-off. But moooo-oooommmm, I can hear a child saying, I have seventeeeeeeeeeeeeen best friends - how can I possibly only invite fiiiiiiiive?
And I understand that there are kids who might never get invited to anything if it weren't for this school policy. Not because they are socially undesirable, but because along with this inherent sense of fairness, kids have also this inherent sense of meanness.
Still, I can't help but feel sympathy for a parent, who, with great trepidation, says to their child Ok now, here are all 29 invitations for your class and let's pray to God that not everybody says they're coming because I'll have to rent a hall to accommodate everybody and I can't imagine how much birthday cake I'll have to bake.
When the invitations come home, I go through this round of questioning with the kids:

1. Do you know this child? If the answer is yes, we proceed to the next set of questions. If the answer is no, we RSVP "will not be attending."
2. If the answer to #1 is "yes," then I ask, "is this someone you play with at school?" If the response is "yes," then we move on to the next question. If the response is a lukewarm "sometimes" or "no," then typically, we RSVP "will not be attending."
3. If the answer to #1 and #2 is yes, then I ask, "You know this kid, and you play with this kid at school. Do you want to go to the party?"

This usually resolves the issue of whether or not to accept the dozen or so party invitations that make their way home in backpacks the first six weeks of school. There are a few benefits to my system, I feel.

• If you're a parent who follows school policy and invites every child to the party, you might be breathing a sigh of relief that another parent has exhibited some common sense and made the decision that, since your children don't normally spend a lot of face time together, it would probably be ok to not attend, thus driving up the cost of a party for the hosting parent. This is especially nice when the party is at local venue like Chuckie Cheese or some place where there needs to be an exact head count to determine cost.
• If your child is interested in pursuing a friendship with a child he/she plays with occasionally, a birthday party is one step toward encouraging a friendship. However, if your child doesn't even recognize the name of the birthday kid, I think the answer to "will Johnny be going to the party" is a no-brainer.
• If you're a parent who is concerned about going broke buying birthday gifts for 29 classmates, fear no more: If your kid doesn't know the birthday boy/girl, doesn't play with that child and doesn't want to, and doesn't want to go to the party, then you RSVP "no" and don't worry.

Children are born with this inherent sense of fairness, and it rears its head at the most inopportune time. My brother related this story, which he witnessed as he was picking up his child from pre-school the other day.
A youngster in the class had been handing out invitations to his birthday party. Only a select handful of kids in the class were presented with an envelope. One of the kids is friends with my brother's child. This little tyke responded, upon receipt of his envelope, "Where's Sally's? Sally has to have one, too. She's my friend. Does Sally get an invitation?"
Whereupon, the youngster with the invitations looked rather blank, and thankfully, Sally seemed oblivious, not realizing she was being snubbed.
I feel that 4-year-olds are not socially skilled enough to handle dispersing invitations to classmates, unless they're inviting everyone. In this case, a parent should probably have invited children by phone, or by U.S. mail, or a more discreet tucking of an invitation into the child's cubby, to be taken home amongst the raft of papers that always accompany a child home at the end of a pre-school day.
And while I sympathize to an extent with the parents who follow policy religiously, and invite every child (perhaps secretly hoping there will be an outbreak of common sense and only their child's friends will attend), I still think there are some things to be considered:

• Schools are often left with the task of teaching manners to children whose parents have somehow failed to instill them, or who have never bothered to try. Thus, the "invite one, invite all" policies.
• Regardless of good intentions, the possibility of them going awry is always there.
• In real life, we are not always invited or included or welcome "everywhere." This is where discretion and tact are needed, but still being learned, at an age when it really, really, really matters to those who are left out.
• If your child isn't buddies with the birthday kid, don't be a jerk and say, "Oh! Free babysitting, just for the small cost of a birthday gift!" and dump your child at an event he/she was likely invited to simply because of school policy. I knew a parent who had such a child at their home for 8 hours, because of school policy, and because of rude parents who said, "We're leaving town for a while, but we'll be back at the end of the party." They weren't back, and the parent fed that poor child dinner, and prepared to have that child overnight because the parents were having too much fun shopping or whatever to be bothered.

Birthday parties seem to be a rite of passage at the elementary school age. They should be approached as a simple pleasure, and not one wrought with peril. Are "invite one/invite all" policies just common sense? Should schools even have policies relating to out-of-school activities? As parents, it can be difficult to navigate through this. What are your thoughts?