What was your real reason for a child free wedding?

[pookachook]

If you had a child free wedding and were being 100% honest, what was your real reason for it? Weighing up pros and cons atm. Seems to be a bit emotionally charged.

Before sending out invitations we asked our closest friends whether they would want to bring their children or not. It was a resounding no! Our wedding was the last of DH’s friendship group and the first of mine so they wanted to celebrate in a child free way. We made a few exceptions though - my nearly 3yo niece was the only child on my side (DH’s side had no children) and she was a flower girl so lots of family to share the care, my cousin and his wife brought along their 1 yo as they had no other childcare and a friend of DH’s brought her 6 wo whilst her older child stayed with family.

I did. A few reasons.

1 - we would have ended up with more kids than adults, many of the kids we have no relationship with
2 - it would have more than doubled our numbers and therefore our budget
3 - we've been at numerous weddings where kids have screamed/puked/knocked bottles off tables/not been parented adequately
4 - we don't have kids, our closest loved ones don't have kids.

Other people’s kids quite often are a right royal pain in the arse. When there’s a pack of them, it’s not long before they all start running around and sliding on the floor.

We have gone down the route of only inviting children of exceptionally close friends/family who do not have alternative babysitting options.

I'd have said no because it would be so awkward.

Awkward to accept payment for entry, and awkward for my friends whose children were not invited to see a random child there.

If the parents had offered me money I would suggest they give it to a babysitter instead.

We had a child-free wedding decades ago.

It was entirely the groom's motive, I wasn't bothered but he didn't want the risk of children making children-noise during the ceremony. I would have been totally OK to ignore the odd gurgle/squeak and trust the parents to exit if it became a catterwaul, but that's not what he wanted and the only people on the guest list with kids were friends of his from his hometown who I had never met so I felt I had no skin in the game. They politely declined the invitation. It never bothered me till I joined mumsnet years later and found out what an emotive topic it is for some people.

When we had kids of our own if we got a "no kids" invitation we either negotiated which one of us would go solo or would just decline. Wouldn't occur to me to make a fuss unless it was my own sister or something.

I only had 1 6 year old at my wedding (son of my bridesmaid). No other children were invited because i’ve been to two weddings where they screamed during the ceremony and the speeches.

Thanks all, makes sense. To be more specific, do you think it's rude to only invite family kids (siblings' and cousin' kids)?

Also, if a kid is breastfeeding but is a year and a half, so I need to invite them?

Because it would have trebled my daytime guest list and I'd have had to bump good friends to evening only just so my cousins dc could have attended. I don't see them from one year to the next and wouldnt have recognised them anyway. There's LOADS of them. Did disgruntle some people and a few declined the invite... It was a price I chose to pay.

I think this over-simplifies the issue. We would have had 18 children at our wedding which would push the total number of guests into the category of a much larger wedding with a larger venue required. Larger venues tend to mean a more expensive meal package per head, plus extras so we're no longer just looking at the additional cost of one person or even 18 people but instead a much larger budger for the wedding as a whole. And we couldn't of course, just let one guest pay for their child as then, on the day, we'd have all the other parents asking why and then saying they would have paid, had they been given the option.

Best answer so far.

Everyone’s children would have added another 20 guests to our 65 person wedding and really changed the feel. I wouldn’t have ruled it out but our dream venue was 70 person max and didn’t allow children (with a few small exceptions!). So we had our nephew as page boy and my cousin brought her breastfed baby!

Most of the kids were on my DH’s side and as a group of friends who’d known each other since school they embraced the opportunity to have a children free weekend away together (we live 200 miles away from where he grew up). Us paying for the accommodation probably sweetened the deal but we saw it as the least we could do for the amount of travel it would require to get 50% of our guests there!

Partly cost, and partly blissful ignorance about the realities of childcare.

You absolutely don't have to invite a one and half year old just because they happen to be breastfeeding. The child doesn't need to be with his/her mother for sustenance - they can eat a full dinner by that age!

Personally I think inviting children you're related to is completely different. Weddings (for some) are a family event and it makes sense to have children in the family there if that's what the bride and groom want. I don't think it opens the floodgates for everyone to bring their progeny along.

I don't think that's remotely rude.

No, you don't need to invite a breastfed 18 month old. The rationale behind inviting tiny breastfed babies is that they cannot be away from their mother. An 18 month old can - the parents can decline if they don't want to leave them, but that's different to not being able to. I breastfed my eldest until she was 2.5 and would have expressed for an evening and morning feed if I was away overnight at 18 months.

Didn't want the noise, mess and disruptions. We wanted a predominantly adult day/evening. Didnt want to have to cater for loads of kids or consider child friendly venues etc. We had 5 there (neices and nephews) but no friends' kids etc. Our friends appreciated it as they wanted some child-free time and didn't have to leave early to put them to bed.
I may be wrong but I'd assume most people's reasoning is pretty similar.

Because lots of kids are brats and their parents don't care. I have 2 kids now and I would never bring them to a wedding.

Numbers.

Allowed babies though, think it’s totally unreasonable not to

It's not rude. You can do whatever you want. We only had neices and nephews. Noone batted an eyelid.

Don't invite the 1.5 year old purely because they're BF. They're on solid foods and can drink from a cup, they don't need to be there for BF in the same way a 2 month old would.

Numbers.

Mostly cost.

We limited it to around 30 people. If we invited any children, we would have been pressured to invited all the children in the family, which would have been a minimum of 12 more guests. Children would also have found what we had planned pretty boring, so we'd have probably had to pay out more for some kind of kid entertainment.

Honestly didn't put that much thought into it. We had relatives' kids and a few littlies.

But if you count grown up "children", loads were excluded, my parents invited lots of their/ PILs' friends but not their children. I think it's fairly traditional to go to your friends' children's weddings, as you've known them from age dot and have an emotional investment, whereas the children themselves, now in their 20s/30s, don't necessarily have that level of friendship with each other. So at some point there's a cut off between having small children and not having grown up ones, IYSWIM.

I wrote something like 'Due to the large number of children we know, sadly we can only include the wedding party and babes in arms'. I then made sure that the kids we wanted to include were part of the wedding party e.g. bridesmaid, ring bearer etc.

My neighbour had wanted a ‘child free’ wedding to save money. She hoped that it meant only one half of the couples with kids would attend. But she ended up getting no declines lol.

We married 5 years ago in our mid-late 30s and if the family and friends we all invited brought their children we would have gone from 50 guests to over 100 and we just didn't have the money or space in the venue for that. We had kids in the bridal party and that was it for the daytime.

Some evening guests brought kids (some were invited, some we didn't expect, and some had been let down by childcare last minute and we said it was ok) but we'd had a lot of last minute cancellations anyway so there was enough space for the evening even with the ones we didn't expect.

one of my aunts had 4 children (my cousins) and each one had a minimum of 3 children. That one aunt and descendants would have taken up about 23 guest places. I barely knew any of the children’s names. All children would have brought my total family to 80 when we had a 100 person limit. Let alone his family and our friends.
I wanted to be surrounded by friends and family I knew.