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.
We live in an affluent community. We learned real quick that we were not going to keep up with the “jones” when my daughter came home with an invitation to go skiing over winter break. Her friend’s family was going to St. Moritz.
We kept our parties small.