My son doesn’t get invited to Birthday parties

[LaraS2511]

My son is 12, he is yr 7 of secondary school. For as long as I can remember he hasn’t been invited to many parties, maybe a handful since he was a baby. He had a gaming party recently, 6 boys came. One of them told me it was also his Birthday & he was having a bowling/darts party, no invite in return. Equally the 6 boys that came to his Birthday also came last year & only one of them invited my son to his Birthday. He is lovely boy, not overly outgoing or confident, he isn’t sporty so we don’t see parents at clubs etc but I make the effort to always say hello & be polite. Just wish he would be invited & not left out!

I think parties drift and not many actually happen at secondary school.

Though I also know my oldest would only tell me about them if he wanted to go.

Neither of my secondary schoolers have had parties since well before Covid. They might go up town with some mates to hang out and pop to Nando’s but no parties.

In fact even my primary schooler hasn’t asked to have a party for a couple of years now I can think of three children in her year that I know have had parties in the last 4 years.

He needs to find like-minded friends. Does he hang around w other boys at school and they leave him out of arrangements? It was like that with my DD so it had nothing to do with sports. At 12 you can’t really make their arrangements for them either.

However, DS was never sporty at school - he did football for a bit in earlyprimary to ‘fit in’ but he was rubbish so stopped. He gravitated to the boys who were in to other things and did drama out of school in primary/early secondary, played guitar so was in the school band (in late primary). He always had friends who were girls too.

There were a lot of parties in both primary and secondary and he was invited to a big majority, he’s very personable although he did have some friendship issues in mid-teens when the boys try to be top dog during puberty.
He’s at uni now and has some good friends there and my DD made most of her good friends in sixth form and uni/working. She isn’t in contact with any friends from primary or early secondary now.