Inviting kids from the other class to birthday parties

[Prosiey]

My DS is 5, he just started school this year and I’m already feeling a little fatigued with birthday parties. His school has 2 classes of 12 children per year, many of the children might know each other from the pre-school but my son didn’t go to the pre-school. Only PE, Swimming, and Forest School are taught to the two classes together.

This weekend we have another party invite, in a town 30 minutes away, for a child DS doesn’t even really remember, I’ve never spoken to her parents, and she’s not in the same class as DS.

Obviously we are going to go as I don’t want DS to feel like he’s missing out especially if it ends up spoken about at school, but between Halloween, Bonfire night and a child we don’t knows birthday party the whole weekend will be busy now.

I don’t really understand why parents invite children from the other class? Fair enough if you know that child from pre-school but for the most part if you don’t why invite them?

AIBU?

I think a lot of posters must be quite well.off to host a party for 24 kids.!

People do what they want but Childhood Parties have become like Status Symbols and competitive and the numbers out of control.

Just saying

Most school classes have 30 or 31 kids, so 24 is not a big number.

If you rent a hall and have that kind of party, it doesn't cost you more to have 30 or 40 kids there. It's usually cheaper than a 10 guests party to specific venues.

There's nothing about "Status Symbol" when people organise a class party, why would you think that

My son invites who he wants across whatever class they’re in. People say yes or no and I don’t take it personally either way. I think you can absolutely start ensuring you’re doing fun things but also having breaks from it - unless your son is desperate to do something, it’s really easy to just decline politely.

I quickly decided in reception that I would not change plans so the children could attend children's birthday parties.
With 25-30 children in a class and 100 a cohort it easily gets very overwhelming.

To add to the other comments, in my child the class sizes are similar (2 classes of 13-14max) and each year half of one class gets moved to the other so just because this year they aren’t in the same class doesn’t mean next year they won’t be.

As I have said on 2000 other birthday threads we invite friends and we go to parties of friends, no I do not hire a solicitor to keep me up to date on the latest birthday rules and people can feel as sorry as they like for any children we have but no we do not spend our whole life attending children's parties there is not weekends in the year to go to them and normal family things and whatever

People decline our invites or attend, we decline others or attend, and the sun still rises in the morning

I was hoping this was gonna be a working/middle/upper class debate 👍🙂