How do you explain a child not being invited to a class party?

[SMLSML]

I know I've seen posts on this before but can't seem to find them now...

My little girl is in reception in a small village school, class size of 15 kids. Her birthday is at the start of the school year and we invited the whole class as we were able to with the space and a couple of other kids in the class did the same. We've had our first party this week where the whole class wasn't invited (13 out of 15 were). One of the kids took the class mascot along to it and presented this to the class today so my little one came home and asked why she wasn't invited. She does play with the child whose party it was fairly often and talks about him.

How do you navigate situations like this? I don't expect her to be invited to everything, totally understand it's the child's choice, just so hard at this age to explain why she wasn't invited in a way that won't make her feel sad or upset, any advice much appreciated!

You say that it is down to the parents, they limit the numbers.

Inviting 13 out of 15 is very bad form.

Exactly just inviting 10 wouldn’t have been so bad but to ostracise just 2 is shameful IMO.

How do invites get given out? 13 out of 15 sounds an error?

Ageee that 13 is horrific, are you sure the invitation didn’t get lost they couldn’t contact you or something? I couldn’t get in contact with a parent once before a party and I felt so bad when they texted the day of the party asking why I’d tried to ring (text message hadn’t sent, turned out they’d been on holiday). I’ve had to tell the kids the parents obviously only could invite a few people or they didn’t play with them in school so the parents probably only invited people they knew they played with or the fact that my kids hadn’t invited them to parties so I guess they didn’t think about us etc etc. Basically winged it/ lied/ told them it happens, sorry it happened but we’ll go to the cinema this weekend/ some such bribe

Those asking if it's an error, it isn't, we've got a class WhatsApp group and no mention of it in there, assume there's either another group or invites given to the teacher for book bags. Agree it's not great on the numbers with 2 being left out but end of the day I agree it's up to the parents to decide the numbers/who is invited. Just finding it tricky why explaining, especially when it was shown today on the class mascot show and tell 🥺

unless they really didn’t get on with a child (which doesn’t appear to be the case) I wouldn’t dream of inviting 13 out of 15. Just unnecessarily cruel. Fair enough to just invite a few but to leave just 2 out is odd.

I would just say sometimes we aren’t invited to things and it’s okay to be disappointed and leave it at that.

That said, when this happened to me (twice!) as the host, it’s because there were multiple children with the same name and the invite s for Jacob and Tyler from Y2 went into the tray of Jacob and Tyler in Y1 (because they are all in the hall where they put on their coats). I had no idea there were so many children with the same name! I ended up with both the wrong Jacob and Tyler and had to scramble up invites for the right ones too. 🙈 Exact same thing happened the next year but I misinvited totally different ones then!

How do you know the numbers that were invited (sorry, I don't quite understand the mascot thing).

I agree that 13 of 15 is really bad etiquette. You either invite all or at most around half if it's from a class of kids.

You just say something like they could only invite a certain number of people in as breezy a tone as I could manage - but really, 13 out of 15 is terrible. I mean , who does something like that? I'd mentally label the parents 'twats' and would limit my interaction with them.

It really would seem it was a mistake.

Presumably there's 14 kids in the photo...
Yours was the only not invited? I'd ask another parent how the invites got received and take it from there.

I'm assuming there were 13 guests abd the birthday child, a total of 14?

Either way,it's sounds like a mistake rather than deliberately omitting.

Gosh, it is pretty mean to exclude two out of fifteen. We invited a smaller group of children one year because my child didn’t feel comfortable inviting a child who had been constantly targeting him with violence, but I made sure it wasn’t obvious. It sounds like a very different situation here though.

Normally just “Aw I don’t know pal probably a numbers thing. Their loss anyway, why don’t you show me how high you can jump on the trampoline/ how fast you can run to the other end of the garden/ something to distract them.”

DS doesn’t seem to care much for being left out, but DD definitely did care a lot. She would get pretty upset, but when we just brush it off and tell her it’s their loss, that works. Once she was absolutely devastated though so I bribed her with a toy.