That happened to me once in elementary school. Lesson learned, a birthday party should have friends invited. Classmates aren’t all friends.
Unless everyone in that class was a friend that parent should not have exposed their child to that potential rejection.
That's how it was when I was growing up, I would only invite my closest friends, not everyone in the class.
I was thinking the same thing. It’s a rare year in which one of our children gets to have a “friend” birthday party as we usually celebrate as a family. When it’s a party we invite two to four friends, knowing they will likely say yes.
Knowing that her daughter has a disability that affects her ability to interact with other children, her mother should have chosen a wiser plan to bless her daughter on her birthday rather than expose her to the pain of total rejection.
At one of the local parochial schools here, private birthday parties are not allowed because some classmates might end up getting excluded. While I understand the rationale -- and, for the record, I was the kid at school nobody played with -- I still find this a bit intrusive. A child should have the same right as an adult to pick or choose friends without being labeled a snob. What the family does at home is nobody else's business.
In this day and age you have to invite everyone in the class if the invitations are handed out at any School activity.