I know I am being unreadable here but…
my son is 9, for the first 3 years of school there were a group of four boys who did things together sometimes out of school, parents became close-ish, always invited each other to their parties etc. this has now drifted slightly, my son has had a particularly hard time from one of the four boys and it’s been tricky to manage. My son’s birthday is at the end of July. He wants to invite one of the boys of the four that were friends, but not the other two. The mother of the boy who had been particularly unpleasant will automatically assume all three other boys will be invited. I have tried persuading my son to invite all three of them but they are adamant they don’t want to. I feel the only reason I keep asking if they are sure they don’t want to invite the others is because of the difficult child’s mother. I feel I need to make it a small party now so as not to offend her or her son, when I know that’s ridiculous really, and I feel the need to ask my child to lie and play it down that they aren’t really doing much to appease this mother, it’s batshit the way she makes me feel. I have orchestrated it so he only has his two special friends from school and two from out of school now so I don’t have any confrontation. My child should be excited about their birthday, not me putting pressure on for them to lie about it.
how do I handle it? This child is nasty to mine but I feel I need to keep the peace 🤷♀️