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Proper Six Year Old B-Day Party Invite Etiquette
ElJeffe
Registered User, ClubPA regular
Registered User, ClubPA regular
Okay, hear's the dealie. My daughter is about to turn six. She has lots of friends in her kindergarten class, and naturally wants to invite lots of them. However, her class is a kindergarten/first-grade combo class with something like 40 kids in it (sounds crazy-big, but there are three teachers plus assistants, but that's all beside the point).
Anyway, school policy is that if a student wants to hand out invitations to a party at school, they must hand them out to everyone in the class, so as to avoid hurt feelings and such. We don't know the parents of any of her school friends, so we don't have an obvious mechanism to give them to select students outside of school. And while I know that not every kid would come, by the time you figure in close friends and family and school friends and one or more of their parents, we're easily looking at 50+ people at this party. And handling a party of that size would be... inconvenient, unless we pretty much scrap all of our plans and hold the thing at a park, or something (and hope for dry weather, which is a crap-shoot).
So do any parents out there have any suggestions for either sneaking around the school's system in a non-blatant, dick-move way, or finding out how to invite a smaller number of people outside the school system? Or any other advice that might be of assistance?
Anyway, school policy is that if a student wants to hand out invitations to a party at school, they must hand them out to everyone in the class, so as to avoid hurt feelings and such. We don't know the parents of any of her school friends, so we don't have an obvious mechanism to give them to select students outside of school. And while I know that not every kid would come, by the time you figure in close friends and family and school friends and one or more of their parents, we're easily looking at 50+ people at this party. And handling a party of that size would be... inconvenient, unless we pretty much scrap all of our plans and hold the thing at a park, or something (and hope for dry weather, which is a crap-shoot).
So do any parents out there have any suggestions for either sneaking around the school's system in a non-blatant, dick-move way, or finding out how to invite a smaller number of people outside the school system? Or any other advice that might be of assistance?
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ElJeffe on
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Is there a list of parents available to you that you can glean last names from?
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If you're really stressing about it, maybe you can talk to the teacher and get kids' addresses or something.
This works well if the kids she wants to come all play at the school together after school. You get to know the parents well enough while waiting for them to finish playing.
Or call the teacher and see what they think, but frankly I would tell them to take the rule and shove it.
Handing the invites to the teacher and asking her/him to hand them to the parents is a dick move if only because you're making the teacher do a lot of sneaky leg work for you, and that's annoying.
Your best bet is hanging out after school with your daughter and having her give the invites to kids as they get picked up by their parents.
[is my inner rage at modern fairness policy coming out at all? Boo hoo, poor six year olds are going to be sad for all of 24 hours before moving on to something else, and in the meantime learn that they are not the centre of the world all the time. Also, having been a wee six year old myself, having one of your non-friends show up to your birthday party is not cool]
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This is generally the route parents at my school take. They wait outside of the room as parents pick up their kids and hand out invitations. While it may seem like a silly rule, in a world where young kids play sports and they don't keep score, we can't have anyone getting their feelings hurt.
I think this is the best avenue. They might not be able to give you the addresses, but I'm sure they can come up with some work around. They don't want to have half the class upset they didn't get invited to the party, but they're not unreasonable and should understand how unwieldy a party would be should all 40 kids show up with a parent in tow.
Just tell her teacher you want to invite her close friends, but don't have an easy way to work around the school's restrictions. This probably isn't even the first time this has come up for them.
But I gotta echo the "ambush parents as they pick their kids up"
(Note: I don't really recommend this.)
It's usually the school board or principal who sets rules like this one.
Helpful. And you're wrong. In my experience it's good to have kids socialize outside of their core group of friends. That being said, potentially having 40+ children in my house would drive me to suicide.
I would either wait until after school for some of the other parents or simply talk to the school. I'm willing to be they come across this now and then. I know it was mentioned above but some schools have a directory that will let you get in contact with other parents as well.
Pen and paper.
Then have her hand out phone number slips.
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I'm one of the kids who never got invited to other parties for the longest time and I can tell you that getting invited with everyone else would make me happy for all of ten minutes. Then I wouldn't care and I'd be generally bored and miserable at the party because I'm not friends with anyone at the party.
I don't think there is any school in your country that would give out home addresses to another parent. At least, I would hope not. That's a serious breach of privacy.
What you probably CAN get is a phone-number list for the parents of the children in your daughter's class. I was a nanny for a bit and the girl I worked with had a list of all her classmates' names, parent names, and parent phone numbers. If you can get the phone number for the parents, you can call them directly and ask for their mailing address.
Also, you should probably decide and discuss with your daughter how many friends is appropriate for her party, if you haven't already. I remember when I was growing up, I was allowed to invite as many friends as the age I was turning - so, 6 friends on my 6th birthday, etc. That seemed to work well for my family and I, but you would know best how much space you have and how many kids you can tolerate. Your daughter probably needs to know that soon so she can think about who she wants to invite.
Well, I wasn't actually thinking of home addresses. The town I live in is small enough that they don't do home delivery, it is all delivered to a p.o. box. Sometimes I forget that people live places with more than 1,000 people.
You are right, they wouldn't give out a home address. They probably wouldn't even do a phone number.
Just talk to the parents of her friends after school, while picking up your kid at the end of the day, if possible. It's the best way, as you'll need to talk to them anyway.
Because they're trying to maintain a friendly and amicable learning environment and having some kids be excluded because the birthday people don't like them isn't conducive to that environment.
"If you go on Summer vacation to Disneyland you must also invite all other kids since they will hear about what a wonderful time your child had and automatically lose IQ points in anger."
"If you reward one child for going above and beyond you must in turn reward all other children for that same achievement even though they don't deserve it."
Crazy concepts.
At the same time, why should the school provide an environment for his daughter to single out and exclude the people she doesn't like? She's supposed to be there to learn.
If children never learn how it feels to be left out, how can they understand why it's important to include others? I remember the first birthday party I wanted to be invited and wasn't, and yeah, it hurt, but I learned an important lesson about showing affection and creating time for others.
Making birthday cards and leaving them for friends on or inside desks is a fun experience for kids but, it's also an important one. Yeah, children can be cruel but, if you eliminate opportunities for your kids to learn important social skills in an effort to protect them, you end up crippling their social abilities.
I understand why schools care, it's an over-zealous effort to curb bullying. If they want to help children understand why it's important to be kind to others, they should find a more appropriate way to do it.
wow good idea A+ would read again.
It's not up to the school to teach your child about being left out, about including others, etc. That's up to you, the parent. If the school can take measures to keep bullying out as much as possible, all power to them.
Yes most kids are little shits but creating a situation where a parent must cater to 30+ kids when they only want 10 is just retarded.
You don't have to. You can invite the kids from another venue, although that would require not being a lazy shit.
Yes, undermine other parents to facilitate your laziness. Who cares that all the other parents will have to deal with their children hating something because you wanted to pass the buck.
You create the situation for yourself by sending your kid to school with birthday invitations.
Really, if the only way your child has of contacting his "friends" is by talking to them at school, they aren't exactly his "friends." They're schoolmates.
Tell your kid to get phone numbers from the handful of friends he wants at his party, or wait and talk to the parents after school when they pick up their kids.
The school's rule is intended to stop parents from sending their kids to class with invitations without actually saying "NO INVITATIONS ALLOWED."
This is treading dangerously close to D&D material, but it is rather weird that we all decry schools that don't do enough to stop bullying in middle school and high school, but when they make the effort to do so in grade school, everybody starts bitching about precious snow flakes and valuable life lessons.
Which is understandable, and I don't think anyone has a problem with that. If you read through the thread, all of us have said 'Talk to the parents yourself.'
No matter what happens, though, some kids will find they've been left out. Jeffe's daughter may talk about the party beforehand, or she and her friends may talk about it afterward, perhaps while playing with the gifts received at the party. The non-friends will inevitably be disappointed, because kids talk and brag, and things spread, even when they're only 6 years old.
For the I was in the Cool clique/I wasn't invited to parties in school and it made me a cutter crowd: This is probably not the forum for that discussion.