There’s a rule that if you are going to hand out birthday party invitations at school, then you have to invite everybody in the class. I just today found out about this rule.
I sent Colum to school with a handful of invitations for a few favourite classmates and a mom friend told me about it in the school yard. Maybe I’d heard/read something about it before? Like last year maybe? In any case, I didn’t know.
It will be okay because I already sent a note to school last week and asked if his kindergarten teacher could discreetly put the invites in the kids’ bags and she said sure. I also told Colum that his teacher would give them out and he shouldn’t say anything because we don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings. We don’t want anyone to feel left out. But we simply cannot accomodate everybody. I thought I was being extra considerate.
I don’t understand what else parents are supposed to do. I can invite the kids we see outside of school, sure. I can invite the kids whose parents I already know and like. But those aren’t necessarily going to be the same people my children want to invite. If a child goes to daycare or is bussed in, then they don’t get birthday party invitations? Not unless we invite all 20 children?!
I was so happy for Colum when he was invited to a couple birthday parties over the past year. I was excited that a couple kids liked him enough to want them at their parties. He had friends and I was careful to make sure those people were also among the few to be invited to our party. And now I feel cheated.
I feel worse than cheated. I feel foolish and there’s a lump in my throat as I write this. Those party invitations which we were not expecting in the first place were not special overtures toward friendship. We rearranged our family’s weekend schedule to accomodate those parties and the birthday kid, perhaps, didn’t even particularly want us there. Those invites were nothing but an obligatory duty set forth by some meddling administration.
And now, when Colum’s classmates receive their invitations, will they also imagine that everyone was invited? They (or their parents, rather) won’t realize that we only invited seven children. They’ll probably assume we aren’t expecting, indeed don’t even want, everyone to attend.
And to what end? So everybody feels included and nothing is special. Of course, people will continue to have parties and they will continue to invite only a select few people. As the kids get older, they will know. It doesn’t matter if invitations are handed out inside or outside of school. They will know. Not everybody is going to be friends with everybody, that’s just life. There’s no school policy that can change that.
Am I missing something? Do policies like these really help anyone at all?