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On a recent Sunday morning, I got a text from a friend asking if we were going to Henry’s birthday party later that day. Henry (whose name has been changed to protect my kindergartner’s social life) was someone I’d heard my 5-year-old mention before, but he certainly wasn’t her good friend. “Morning! We’re not. I don’t think we were invited to this one …” I wrote back, unoffended by the lack of invitation. But then, another, more unsettling thought crossed my mind: “Or I missed the invite, which is also very possible,” I added. Sure enough, when I typed “Henry” into my inbox search a few moments later, two things came up: an invitation to the party and a reminder to RSVP. I’d missed both.
Naturally, a mini spiral ensued. Another thing I had missed! Another thing to miss. Don’t get me wrong—I love taking my daughter to her friends’ birthday parties. Like most kids, she adores an excuse to dress up and an opportunity to play with her pals. And I genuinely enjoy helping her shop for gifts for her besties, picking things out together that we know they’ll appreciate—like the Wild Robot book one friend hadn’t read yet, and the nail stickers another admired when they were over for a playdate. Plus, selfishly, it’s one less hang I need to plan myself, and I usually get to see my parent friends there, so bonus for me. But getting invited to every birthday party for all 25 kids in her class adds up.
It means having to make time in our schedules to attend these parties and buy presents for each kid, which is harder to do when you don’t know them—and who wants to saddle a kid, or a parent, really, with one more thing they don’t need or want? Because we live in a rural area and kids are spread out in every direction from school, it also means driving, sometimes over an hour, to each event. Not to mention keeping track of these things to begin with, and I can’t even seem to get that far.
Of course, as a parent to one of the 25 kids, I’m expected to host an everyone’s-invited party, too. But a kid’s birthday party, even when we keep it small and do it at our house, gets expensive quickly and takes a lot of planning. Food, juice boxes and adult drinks, goody bags that aren’t filled with junk, extra goody bags for her classmates’ siblings who tag along (don’t even get me started!), decorations, and a cake big enough to feed all these folks are not nothing. It’s a joy to celebrate my kid and her birthday, and I feel lucky to be able to do it, but I want the joy to be ours. Something my family does on our own terms rather than yet another obligation to add to our already overflowing plates.
While I appreciate inclusivity—I don’t ever want anyone to feel left out—I’m not even sure the kids notice or care. My kiddo never mentioned Henry’s birthday party to me, before or after; I don’t even think she knew about it. Her classmates probably didn’t come to school gushing about it after the weekend. They’re little kids—they barely remember what they had for breakfast. Which brings me to the question: Who are we doing this for, and at what cost?
In an environment in which a lot is already being asked of us as parents—on top of our jobs, family obligations, social lives, exercise regimens, doctor visits, tax consultations, vet appointments, license renewals, and future planning, let alone family vacations and personal pursuits—I would love to have one less to-do to add to my list. One less email to feel bad for missing, one less thing to feel guilty about when I inevitably don’t adhere to the rules and invite only some of the class to our celebrations.
I also don’t seem to be alone in feeling this way. A recent survey published in the Journal of Pediatric Health Care found that “65 percent of working parents reported burnout.” And in the late summer of 2024, then–U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Vivek H. Murthy issued an advisory deeming parental stress an urgent public health issue, the first of its kind. “While parents and caregivers are working more, they are also spending more time engaging in primary child care than before,” the warning states. And “evidence suggests that demands from both work and child caregiving have come at the cost of quality time with one’s partner, sleep, and parental leisure time.” Our leisure time aside, it’s no secret that the more exhausted we are, the worse we are at parenting our kids.
This isn’t the biggest issue right now, or the most important—certainly there are parents up against much, much worse—but still, the endless stream of birthday parties feels representative of how far we’re willing to go in the name of our children without stopping to do a cost-benefit analysis. I’d like to think the more we discourse about this kind of thing, the closer we might get to something like change. In the meantime, I’ll be RSVPing to the next invite.
