AIBU to cancel after my son was excluded from the after-party?

[Snowdrops99]

DS 7 is due to go to a birthday party this weekend at a location around a 30 minute drive away, similar party to laser tag with activity then party food and cake. They've invited 9 boys and 5 girls from the class. The boys play together at school but I wouldn't say any of them are particularly close.

Anyway, it turns out there's an after party back at the birthday boys house, with 5 of the 8 boys invited to play video games and eat pizza. DS hasn't been invited to this part of the party. I know he'll be so upset when he finds out as he loves those activities. He'd choose doing that over laser tag I think. I'm thinking of withdrawing him from the party as we have relatives visiting anyway. That way I can take the blame and he doesn't feel his peers have left him out.

Aibu to cancel him going to the party to avoid him feeling completely left out?

Backstory - DS been dealing with some bullying issues from one of the boys in this group of 5 and his self esteem is already pretty low. I worry this could make things even worse for him.
In addition, I know that one of the 3 who are excluded have been unkind to the birthday boy at times recently so that feels like this boy is being excluded deliberately. My DS is quieter than the other boys so not the first on everyone's list to be invited to things.

Similar situation with dd8 a couple of months ago, big party but a sleepover with 4 friends for the birthday girl. Dd understood not everyone can sleep over, we only let her have 3 friends for her birthday sleepover, this was exactly the same. Myself and another mum ended up taking the girls not staying shopping after the day party and back to ours to hang out in the end. It wasn’t a big deal.

edited - I wanted to add some CF parents who never have their shit together decided to invite every child bar 1 from the party to a sleepover the night before the party 3 days before, so all children were exhausted after still being awake at 3am from the impromptu party/sleepover. My DD and the ones not on the sleep over the next night were the only ones who made it to a special school event on the Sunday because all the other kids ( including lead children) where too exhausted.

This happened me. But my DS was invited back but 3 weren't.
It didn't sit right with me.

In the end something happened and there wasn't an after party anyway.

Not sure but parties are hard to navigate and sometimes adults make more of it than the kids.
Good luck with what you decide is right

I think I’d still let him go to the laser.
These parents sound very mean, as do many of the kids in the group! I’m not sure in the long run I would want this ‘community’ to be one I had in my life really. They’re only 7 yet so much nastiness between the kids…

Sorry but if you’re a parent who has a party and then a second part of the party where you exclude some kids; you’re pretty horrible.
I really cannot see any justification for orchestrating such a scenario.

It will be down too something related to the practicality of having more than a certain number back at theirs afterwardsm

The most likely reason is space. They might have a small house and they don’t want it to be too overcrowded and intense.

If OPs son was the only kid not invited to the after party then yes that would have been mean, but he’s not.

Of course it is. There is no intention to emotionally scar any child. The mother was good enough to throw a party to start with, probably costing the guys of 3/4 hundred pounds.

The more he takes up these invitations, the less likely he is to be bullied.

The 'after-party' is at someone's house and so restricted on space. He should be able to understand this. Don't exclude him further.

It’s also very common to have a birthday party with a few stay for a sleepover after, nothing malicious about that.
don’t stir up issues where there are none.

If there were only 2 or 3 boys invited back I wouldn’t be worried but 5 is quite a number!

We are talking about 7 year olds, I think this is very unfriendly and not inclusive. I can understand OP’s concerns. People have no empathy!

Just say we can't stay afterwards, we have guests arriving

Even if they don't bring it up

Kids don't build resilience from being excluded and bullying.

Just let him go to the laser quest bit. It's not as if he's the only one not invited to the second part.

And limiting the number of 7 year olds in your house! Seems like a valid reason to me.

You would be unreasonable because you have a 7 year old who thinks he is going to laser tag … why would you want to now upset him by not letting him go?

As much as I don’t really like the idea of things like this, it’s not totally unheard of that only a smaller group can be accommodated in the house, so not everyone will have been invited.

You can’t be serious, check your privalge, not everyone can accommodate more than 6 kids for pizza and video games, either due to house size or simply the mental capacity to deal with it. I can’t beleive you think it’s mean not to invite all 14 kids back to their home and he shouldn’t be allowed a small get together after the main party, that’s mean, not this,

op, I think the bullying has you over sensitive and hyper vigilant, which would be normal,but you’re saying you’d feel the same if it was adults and you, if you went to a party with 14 other guests and found out a grp of 5 continued after, and that’s a really concerning way to think, you are not entitled to go to eveyrghing people have, and should not pass that view to your child.

I have to agree. For my son's birthday next year he wants to do a day out with a small number of close friends 3/4 then have his best friend sleep over. We could have all the kids sleepover but ds gets very dysregulated after too long in a big group and his best friend doesn't cope in a big group at all so it just wouldn't be feasible this year, maybe as they get older. I'd be horrified if a friend didn't come because of feeling excluded.

It’s poor form to have the five boys going round after the party. They should have saved that for another time. There are more not being invited than invited though so it’s not like he’s being singled out. Just explain to him that there is only so much room in a house so he wasn’t invited this time. It’s so hard when there has been unkind behaviour involved. Parties are a minefield at this age. It’s the time when kids have their own opinions and sometimes those feelings change on a dime.

I get where you're coming from but please, please don't cancel. I'm a childcare worker in Germany and I studied paedagogy for 3 years and have a lot of experience with small children.

So many parents are frightened their kids can't handle small things like this and then avoid them altogether, which is really terrible for child development and creates risk averse kids who experience small knocks and rejections as catastrophes. Any sadness your son has at not being invited to the afterparty will be offset by the laser tag and the rest of the party. You can explain to him that the parents just want a quiet time after the party and therefore probably restricted their son to just 5 kids.

Don't compare it to adult situations! Adults are not kids, our experience is not equivalent or comparable. Children are much more resilient than we think and often stuff that we would find devastating they just shrug off like water off a ducks' back. Adults and children exist in fundamentally different headspaces. You can't transplant yourself into his situation to empathise with him because it would mean undoing decades of emotional, mental and psychological development.

Please trust your child, trust his process and his ability to move through the world and deal with small knocks. You cannot protect him from the disappoinments of life, and if you try, you will rob him of the tools he needs to deal with them himself. Don't decide for him what he can and can't handle. Let him find out for himself.

(Also from the POV of the parents, kids' parties are exhausting, and I can understand why they only want 5 kids over at the end rather than 15. I just had a laser tag party with my 9 yo son (coincidentally with 15 children) and afterwards the kids were so hyped up and overexcited that coming back to ours to eat cake before they were picked up was an absolute nightmare.)

This. Get your boy to choose two or three of the other children and invite them back to yours to play. Don’t discount the girls. All my children have had mixed sex friendship groups in primary. I was told they would seperate into single sex groups - they didn’t. From reception to year 6 there were mixed sex friendship groups in their class. The eldest still meets up with the mixed sex group several times a year (they all went to different secondary schools). They have a right laugh and are so at ease with each other.

Go through the names of the non after party kids and ask which three he would like to come back for pizza and a film.

If he’s quieter make sure he takes up every invite and is super polite and joins in everything. One of mine was quiet but always thanked the parents, we also practiced chatting to adults, what questions to ask them to make conversation.

DS was invited last minute to a party as another child dropped out on the day. The parents were sheepish as if they were concerned I’d see him as a stand in afterthought I guess. But I didn’t as numbers for these things have to be limited due to cost.

I said to ds ‘you are so lucky, it’s sad that Mary coiuldnt attend but it’s lovely they thought to invite you and of course you can go’ he was very excited and went, the parents said he was so polite and well behaved and he got invited to her party every year going forward. The kids are still in contact years later.

If you feel upset you need to examine why and not pass this onto your son. Not every parent wants 14 kids in their home and he did get invited to the party. Explain and invite a few of them back to yours.

I don't think this is about exclusion or him needing resilience, it's a fairly normal older children's birthday arrangement. We had a lot right through the 8-14 type age range (mainly for the boys actually) which were a bigger group activity out of the house then just three or four for a sleepover with pizza and gaming (they take their devices and screens which involves parents driving the devices to the host's house first).

It's not something he needs to feel upset or bullied by - obviously if he does, work it through with him by talking and understanding - it really is an ordinary arrangement.

I wonder how many of these friendship issues are caused by parents projecting.
Here it is not an issue and my daughter has never given it a second thought when she has gone home and others have stayed for a sleepover. Sometimes she will even explain why herself - those 4 play together every day but I only play with them sometimes, they are best friends while I am a friend.
There is no drama and as others have said it's no different than adults meeting up for a main social activity (e.g. a works do lots of people go for pre drinks in their own departments before going to the main event, and then do their own thing after).
Too many parents are entitled about what their child should be allowed to do (and often it's a case of double standards - there was a post previously with someone moaning about a party but then they had never done one for their child, so it seemed silly to be petty over someone's poor hosting when they couldn't be bothered to do it themselves).

I don't know, my feeling is that if I went out for lunch with some friends and then found out a select group of 5 / 8 were going back to someone's house for drinks etc id feel pretty left out. Especially if one of those people was being quite nasty to me. I don't think that's abnormal?

So you would exclude yourself completely from the group by not doing anything with them at all and just have no friends day in day out for seven hours a day on one hundred and ninety days a year. Even though you would have enjoyed yourself at the lunch and even though you don’t know what the circumstances are of some people going to the later it even if they actually are.

I don’t know why people do this afterparty thing, it’s obviously going to be awful for the kids not invited. I would just have a sleepover on a different day so no-one feels like they didn’t make the “cut”. How many of you would actually feel fine if you were invited out to say a birthday meal and then found out you were excluded from drinks after or something.

OP I’m not sure that hime skipping the main party is going to make him feel that much better tbh.

The parents are mental. Who wants a load of children who have been jacked up on party food at laser tag to then come to their house?

The boys will all fall out because they'll be strung out from the party and it'll end up a disaster anyway.

Go to the party. Have fun, come home.