Kids’ birthday party invites can often be a source of constant drama for parents. After all, they need to manage the number of invitations, the expectations and desires of their children as well as the demands of other parents. For their kids, adults can quickly become advocates, making angry calls when their offspring is excluded.

A parent wondered if they were wrong to allow their eleven-year-old daughter to not invite the class clown to her Halloween party. We reached out to the person who shared the story via private message and will update the article when they get back to us.

Parents can be pretty quick to make angry calls when their kid doesn’t receive an invite

Image credits: wosunan/Envato (not the actual photo)

One parents got into some drama when they explained why another girl wasn’t invited to their daughter’s Halloween party

Image credits: YuriArcursPeopleimages/Envato (not the actual photo)

Image credits: Excellent-Berry5172

Excluding someone is often pretty painful

Image credits: cottonbro studio/Pexels (not the actual photo)

As the variety of differing comments suggested, this was a controversial post. On the one hand, it’s not at all normal or even expected that random other people can suddenly tell a pre-teen girl who she can and can’t invite to her party. This much is and remains true. The main input the parents should have is to make sure their kid doesn’t accidentally invite way too many people.

However, as some commenters noted, excluding a new kid is a surefire way to make sure they stay excluded. The parent in this story has the opportunity for a teaching moment and has decided to not take it. It is important to note that there are perhaps a multitude of details we are not aware of, but, at the same time, most folks who post these sorts of questions to the internet don’t really include lots of mitigating information about the other party.

Some folks refer to their own experiences of being excluded as an emotional appeal to this parent. This is all well and good, but it’s also worth considering what the “alternative” ending here looks like. Say the parent is convinced by the comments and decides to make their daughter invite the other girl. Maybe the party goes well, maybe she really is disruptive, but there is a good chance that the hosting girl now holds some resentment both against their parents for changing their invite list and against the girl.

This Halloween party drama is about more than just some invites

Image credits: maksimovata/Envato (not the actual photo)

This is a considerably more tricky position than one might think, given that the context is a girl’s Halloween party. It’s one of those complicated issues where acting “within your rights” doesn’t necessarily mean you did the right thing. There is no argument that random third parties can’t tell someone who to invite. But, at the same time, excluding a new girl might seem easy to the kid hosting the party, but the parents should know better.

Just as no one can force this girl to invite someone, no one can also tell this parent how to be a parent. Could this be a teaching moment? Yes, but equally, we can’t be crowdsourcing parenting decisions to the internet. Every adult knows their own kid best and, generally, has a lot better information on hand. It’s easy to judge a parent “at a distance,” but it’s a hard job when it’s your child.

The fact that multiple parents are involved at this point is just a testament to the fact that the stakes are a bit higher than one party. If this person is a “class clown,” a term which seems perfectly engineered by a kid to make a parent side against them, then it still doesn’t seem like they would be so disruptive. Kids have a way of learning their parents’ buttons. After all, most “class clowns” do what they do to make their classmates laugh, not to bother them. Perhaps the results are annoying, but that’s true for most attempts at getting some attention.

Some folks wanted more details

Many thought the parent was in the right

But a few thought it was mean

Some thought everyone was being unreasonable 

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