Playdates. Feeling left out.

[Noconfidenceleft]

I know I will sound helpless and pathetic on this but I have this as a constant anxiety. DS is 8 and generally happy at school. He has good friends and a couple of good friends he plays with a lot. I work full time and for 2 evenings per week he spends with his dad so time after school is usually limited with clubs and the like. He does get invited to birthdays but playdates are few and far between.

DS has a couple of friends outside of school through my friends which is all good. I occasionally have organised soft play or trips to the park with some of his school friends but one mum in particular always seems to be busy. Another mum has brushed off invites too. I have on a few occasions heard kids telling my DS that they had a playdate after school - most recently it sounded like one of the mums has had a whole series of playdates with a small group of boys that my son also plays with but on at least 3 occasions that I know of, my son has been excluded. I know I shouldn't get upset over this but it's hard not to be. He has been to few of these boys houses but we never reciprocated I'm ashamed to say. I know I could try and do the same but I am very anxious about the state of our home being in a perpetual mess and it's finding the time as well.

I know this is rambling and just want to do better for my DS. Any tips please.

OP it sounds like a normal small family home.

The friendship group I mentioned where we shared playdates our homes are all very different even though we all live within a mile of school. Some a huge, some are tiny, some in between, some have a tiny yard and some have a big garden, some are rented, some are mortgaged, some have mutligeneratios in one house, some are single parents some are married .... and we all have various levels of clutter chaos from minimal to in between to more than I could comfortably live in.

But none of us judge each person's homes and the kids don't either. My house has a lot of toys which the kids love, one has lots of rooms to hide in, one has lots of painting things etc. Kids don't care in the way you are worrying about!

Have you seen flylady? They do a declutter thing that I've seen people do to weed out their clutter in a short window of time a day, maybe that would help if you would like to minimise some of the stuff in your house.

Op invite a friend over for a playdate at yours on a Saturday afternoon or Sunday morning or something? I think at 8 years old most parents want to just drop off rather than stay.

Honestly this is the mentality that is wrong with the world atm. Not only not doing a fair share but expecting full return which is one thing in itself. But then having the gall to frame it as being excluded

Noone wants to host. And everyone can come up with a plausible reason to let themselves off the hook for fairly contributing. But as someone else said, you want to be in the village, you need to be a villager.

I don’t think it’s ’the world’ so much as it is a certain type of Mner who struggles with human relationships. School run/playground/school pickups and drop offs threads seem to flush them out, presumably because they’re one of the rare situations they’re brought into contact with other people.

They are continually seeing ‘cliques’ and ‘exclusions’ and feeling ‘left out’, in part because it lets them off the hook to think everyone else is mean and that if they invited their child’s friends over to play, their parents would block it.

Your child is happy, if you want him to be invited to play dates then you need to host a few, 8 a little old for soft play, maybe offer to take the boys to a trampoline park or climbing centre if you don’t want to host at home, I suspect these outings have been declined previously as the mums don’t want to go.

We had a large house growing up and had lots of play dates. Other friends had smaller houses and also had play dates.

I don’t think you need to be friends with the parents as a pp said, friendly with them but not best buddies! It’s the kids who will be playing after all not the other parents.