Should you invite the entire class to your kids birthday?

LOOKING back, all I can feel is the most enormous sense of relief that nobody ran out on the road and got lost or even killed.

For several years, birthday parties in our house were gigantic — most, if not all of the birthday child’s class were invited and my attempts to impose some kind of cap on the number of invitations or the duration of the knees-up were inevitably voted down by the rest of the family.

On any given birthday we could have anything between 25 and 30 children engaged in the games and events we organised to keep them going for the entire afternoon.

My kids and their friends loved the parties. I generally spent the big day in a cold twist of anxiety which didn’t dissolve until they’d all been safely fed, head-counted and, most importantly, collected.

I would not, therefore, be a fan of Mark Brearey, the UK school principal who requested parents to invite the whole class to their child’s birthday party, and to avoid bringing any party invitations into school that didn’t include all children. Mr Brearey felt it would be divisive and unkind to issue invitations to only some of the children in your child’s class. Any parents who wanted to invite just a few of their child’s friends, should do it privately, he said.

But not everybody agrees with him. Mr Brearey is the principal of an elite private preparatory school where, perhaps, classes are smaller, and where perhaps, there are plenty of wealthy parents who have sufficient personnel back-up and money to supervise and entertain large numbers of children.

However, putting the onus on parents in this way to invite a whole class is ‘mad’, says Áine Collins, a Fine Gael TD and mother of two small children, aged five and six.

“Some people take children to play centres and large numbers make this very expensive.

“There’s also the job of transporting them there and back if you live some distance away, which can make it difficult,” says Ms Collins, who lives near Millstreet in Co Cork.

Her children, Lily and Thomas, attend a small mixed rural school. Each have about 14 in their class.

“The boys in the class come to Thomas’s party and the girls come to Lily’s. We usually end up with about eight at the party and it is very manageable.

“I wouldn’t have a problem with the whole 14 as it’s a very small school but I think in a situation where a class has 25 or 30 children, that it can be very onerous.”

Cork Mother-of-two, Orla Murphy, approved of the decision by her children’s school to completely ban classroom-based invitations altogether, and instead requested parents to issue birthday invitations privately, by text:

“Children were coming into the school handing out invitations to their friends and it was very obvious who was not being invited,” she recalls.

Some children were upset at being left out, so the school took action.

“The school said that if people were having birthday parties, the invitations were to be circulated outside the school, for example through a text message to the mothers.”

The idea generally went down very well, she says — and the children were definitely happier.

“It took the pressure off people to have a big group to birthday parties and the children didn’t seem to mind not being invited once it wasn’t so obvious.

“They could understand that not everyone could be invited,” she says. Orla, who has two daughters, eight-year-old Liadh and nine-year-old Alannah, believes it’s not the school’s place to decide who parents should invite to their child’s birthday party.

“Generally we’d invite about 12 to 15 people from the child’s class and we’d also have outside friends as well as cousins, so we could end up with 20-24 children, but not all from the class.

Orla enjoys organising her daughters’ birthdays.

“Last September we had a ‘pink’ birthday party with pink cupcakes, pink cake, and pink decorations.

“The birthday was a crafts day where the girls made photograph frames from card and decorated them.

“Then we took their photograph, printed it out and they put the picture in the frame and brought it home — it whiled away a lot of time and it was fierce fun and went down really well. We’re having a One Direction party in February so I’m currently looking for a cardboard cut-out of the band.

“We’ll have a red carpet outside the door and there’ll be a disco and a nail-bar and they’ll all get their photos taken with the cut-out. It’s inexpensive and great fun.”

Birthday parties really should be for parents to decide — and if a child is upset at not being invited, that’s life, says Áine Lynch, CEO of the National Parents Council Primary.

“It brings difficulties if you start having the school interfering in home life,” she says.

“A child may be upset if they don’t get invited to a birthday party but they learn that that’s life. Learning is about getting to understand social norms and expectations. It’s about learning life lessons as well.”

However, she says, children are generally very pragmatic.

“Generally children understand that there are different social friendships in school.”

Insisting that all the children in a class invite every classmate to their parties not only places a heavy burden of responsibility on the shoulders of the host parent — it can also mean a big financial pressure on the parents of the birthday guest, warns Douglas mum Joann Kelleher, who has two children, Jamie, 8 and Katie, 4.

“Overall I disagree with the whole class being invited because you end up with anything up to 31 children, and they can be incredibly difficult to look after.

“There’s a massive responsibility on parents to look after this number of children and it’s very unfair to impose this on a family.”

Pointing out that a lot of families are under financial stress as a result of the recession, she says such a tradition also lays a financial burden on the parents of the guests who may find themselves forking out substantial sums of cash on a regular basis throughout the year.

“Often parents will put up to €15 or €20 in a card as a present which is very generous but it’s too much of a load on the family who are sending their children to the party — particularly if the child is being invited to every birthday in the class.”

Mother-of-two Ciara Lombard from Douglas also enjoys the fun of organising birthday parties for her kids Joseph, 12, and Rebecca, 13, — but she thinks it’s “outrageous” for a school principal to suggest that everyone in the class be asked to a party.

“First of all, children don’t gel with everyone in their class and second of all they often have a lot of friends outside school from other activities such as soccer or gymnastics or karate — and they have their cousins. I think it’s none of his business.”

Her children generally invite a “manageable” dozen or so friends — both from school and from outside school to their birthday parties, she says.

For Joseph’s last birthday party, the family rented an astro-turf pitch and hired someone to coach Joseph and his guests in football for an hour, while for her 12th birthday, Rebecca had a sleep-over with six friends.

“They had pizza and organised their own pampering session and did each other’s nails.”