Actually I meant the parent.
My wife was all over this one. She was saying the whole thing is ridiculous, that the kid is going to pay because the mom is a bitch.
Your wife’s right about that. Birthday Boy will suffer, probably far more than the no-show kid. For $20 +/-? Mom has to learn how and when to pick her battles.
THO it could be that it’s a single mom who works a couple of jobs and this was an enormous sacrifice to put on a party like this for her kid, so the extra $20 she had to lay out for an empty chair might have driven her over the edge.