A nine-year-old girl from a small Canadian town was invited to a birthday party three doors down, but not to the sleepover afterward. The five girls asked to stay overnight had stashed their sleeping bags out of sight and talked in code about the “S.O.” The girl cried so hard when she got home that she went to bed with swollen eyes.
After a kindergartner in North Carolina was the only girl in her class excluded from a party at Chuck E. Cheese’s last May, she wanted revenge. Her 42-year-old mother, who never did find out why her daughter was left out, found herself having to ask the teacher for help.
“It hurt her feelings a lot because all the girls were talking about it,” she says.
Birthday parties are a social minefield that can wound kids and make for poisoned relations among parents in the schoolyard. And there seem to be no clear rules on how to respond. Confront the parents holding the party? Talk to the teacher? Simply ignore the social slight and consider it part of the bumps and bruises of childhood?
Some schools have birthday-party guidelines or policies, which typically state that children cannot pass out invitations on school property unless the entire class is invited. Those who want to invite some, but not all, of the class can do so through e-mail, telephone calls or the post.
The Institute of Child Study Laboratory School, part of the University of Toronto and the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, which has pupils from nursery level to Grade 6, goes further. Its policy states that “in keeping with our philosophy of nurturing kindness, we encourage care in handling all children’s feelings about birthday-party inclusion.”
Branksome Hall, a private girls’ school in Toronto, allows small treats to be brought in on birthdays. “That way, they can have a mini-celebration at school with all of their classmates, even if they cannot have everyone at their party,” says Julia Drake, who oversees the school’s communications.
But whether there’s a policy or not, being excluded from a birthday party is an inevitability of childhood – one that can strike even before kids enter primary school.
“If one child has a birthday party, they hold the social power and they use that,” says Judy Arnall, a Calgary-based parenting expert and mother of five. “They know it’s not right to talk about it upfront, but they go through it in an underground way by saying things like: ‘What are you wearing to my party’... that can just torment kids.”
Exclusion from a birthday party has the most negative impact when it is done to a few rather than a majority of classmates, as it sets the stage for a social shunning, creating an “in” and an “out” crowd.
“Shunning is a different kind of bullying. When you shun somebody, you are omitting them. … It’s really common among girls,” says Kathy Lynn, a Vancouver-based parenting expert. “It’s bad manners. It’s mean.”
Ms. Lynn stresses that this does not mean every child needs to be invited to every birthday party. But she says there is a way for parents to organize a party – and coach their kids on how not to talk about it before or after – so that it doesn’t hurt those who are left out.
“The issue really isn’t who you should invite to birthday parties,” Ms. Lynn says. “The issue is, once you’ve decided who to invite, how you teach your kids to not centre out the ones who didn’t make the list.”
Alyson Schafer, a Toronto-based parenting expert and psychotherapist, suggests parties be organized so as not to exclude a small number of people. Make the party big and invite everybody, or make it small and invite several friends. But don’t invite “everybody except a few.”
Parents and children should also ask themselves: “Are you walking close to that line where you’re cutting out some of the outliers in the class, rather than [having] the ‘all party’ or the ‘select party,’ ” Ms. Schafer says. “Kids can psychologically handle either of those. They can’t handle the ‘all-but-a-few party.’ ”
It’s important, she says, for parents to talk to their children about being excluded from parties as it’s something for which they need to be prepared.
“I think that you can coach your kids on both sides of that. What will you do when people say, ‘How come I’m not invited?’ ” Ms. Schafer says. “And I also think you can coach your child about why didn’t you get invited.”
Indeed, after the kindergartner in North Carolina was excluded from the Chuck E. Cheese’s party, her mother e-mailed the teacher to let her know a social storm was brewing.
The teacher used the exclusion as the basis for a class lesson, explaining that it’s important to not talk about a party when not everyone has been invited.
“The teacher told them, ‘You don’t have to invite everybody in the class, but think about how people’s hearts feel,’ ” the mom recalls.
Just a few weeks after the incident, the girl was planning her own sixth birthday party and she wanted to leave that one girl off her guest list. But her mother told her seeking revenge wasn’t the answer, and said it’s important to take the high road and include everyone.
Instead, the girl found another way to vent her emotions: She decorated the other girl’s envelope in a different way from other guests’.
“She decorated it in a haphazard way; that was how she got her feelings out about it,” said her mother. “By the time the party came, they were both fine. They had a great time.”
