To not have daughter and niece/ nephew in wedding party.

[Mamabear0703]

I am getting married abroad next year, my daughter will be 20 months old, and my niece and nephew will both be 3 years old. Is it unreasonable to not want them in the wedding party as flower girls and paige boys etc?
My reasonings are that getting married abroad was supposed to be taking the stress out of the wedding, it has instead been the opposite and would have probably been easier to get married at home, I feel that trying to coordinate 3 babies to walk where they are required to go is unnecessary, they will still be in the photos and have their dresses etc just without the titles, but a family member thinks I should include them in the wedding party.
What are people's thoughts on this? Would you include or not include?

I’d not include 3 year olds in the day at all, let alone give them roles they can mess up.

YANBU

YANBU at all. Id family member paying for the wedding? Not sure why they think they get a say.

You'd be off your head to expect a pair of 3 year olds and a toddler to 'perform' as part of the wedding party. You may as well herd cats for a living.

Don't stress it, tell your family member to wind their neck in.

None of them are old enough to understand.

The only thing I would consider would be toddler standing at front with her dad with ring cushion if they are the sort thats amenable, as some are, some aren't.

You’re definitely not unreasonable- we have a 3 year old nephew and he wasn’t in our wedding party this year. We spoke to his parents and they prefered he wasn’t a pageboy or anything, to reduce stress trying to get him to cooperate

Aww one of my favourite pictures from my wedding is my best friend trying to herd my 2 year old son and my 4 year old and 18 month old nieces down the aisle. Hilarious! But then we saw our wedding as a celebration of our life together as a family and those children were (still are) a really important part of that.

That said if you do want everything to go really smoothly then I agree having 3 toddlers involved is probably not a good idea!!

It’s your wedding!

If the family are making the effort to get to your destination wedding and they’ll be wearing the outfits anyway, just let them have the title.

It doesn’t matter if they’ll walk in the right place. Take the idea of that pressure away from the situation and it’s a non issue.

We had v young nieces and nephews at the time we got married, they were flower girls and page boys - 2 of each. Apart from these family children it was a child free wedding.

I didn’t find it stressful at all - however, I had absolutely NO expectations of the children. If they walked up the aisle….fine. If they didn’t walk up the aisle….also fine.

For us it was important that they were included - although none of them remember it (too young!) they know they were in the wedding and they enjoy seeing the photos of themselves.

We had four children in our "wedding party" ages 4,3,3 and 15 months. They all managed to walk the aisle with a simple "look, daddy's there, go and see daddy." They were adorable. Don't have them if you don't want them but they were very cute.

You can call them that and do the cute outfits and you decide what that means , they don't have to walk down the aisle, just be in photos , or give them another cute job like scattering petals or something where if they choose not to it's no biggie

I wasn't going to include my nieces (3/6) but turned out they'd been dreaming of holding my train after seeing Meghan Markle's wedding. So the decision was made on the day to let them.

They took the role very seriously, it was really cute! Do the children want to be included? Are they the kind of children who would be likely to enjoy it, or hate the attention?

I’d buy them little outfits but not actually have them in the wedding. That’s what my DB did with my 3 year old DS, his 5 year old DB was a Paige boy.

My daughter isn't quite 9 months yet so hard to tell for her, niece at the moment probably wouldn't give a toss either way unless something paw patrol or bluey was involved, and nephew is a bit of a sensitive soul that I don't think would enjoy it, but it's a year away and they could change in that regard.