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I know a lot of people are leaning towards not inviting children to weddings these days. All of our guests with children are coming from out of town, and I feel bad about separating families for the weekend…plus, I love kids. The things they do are so funny. Want extra reasons to invite kids? They make good use of the dance floor and take really cute photographs.
Image via leodjphoto / Photography by Leo Djiwatampu
In a guest list stare down the other night, I realized that there aren’t that many kids to be invited anyway. The small number reassured me that things would stay adorable and there wouldn’t be an uprising of little ones.
In hopes of avoiding boredom meltdowns in the young ones (and early arrivals), I made a few copies of a wedding activity book to set out with crayons. All I used for this was Word art, clip art, and online search results for coloring and activity pages.
Word Unscrambles by Mrs. Lace
How hard was the decision to invite or not invite kids to your wedding? Were you and your FI on the same side of the fence?
We are a no kids wedding aside from the ones that are in it. We agreed on this from day one.
Yeah, I was firmly on the “we MUST invite them” side because so many of our out-of-towners have kids. Mr. Ladyfingers was neutral camp. But our venue held 80, and if everybody brought their kid, that would be 1/4 of our guest list. So we said no kids. But somebody brought one anyway. But we still love them 
This not only was a tough decision for us, but each of our families wanted the opposite. When we finally decided not to allow kids, a lot of his family has now RSVP no to the wedding, out of principle. No matter what we chose, we lost. It was either disappointing my family or his. In the end we went with what I wanted, not our families. But it was a tough decision and now we are suffering the aftermath.
We didn’t invite kids. I’ve never been much of a kid person, and there were so few in our families anyway… mostly just distant relatives whose kids we’d never met as it was, so we weren’t dying to see them, and luckily if anyone was offended, we never heard about it.
Now there are more kids (families’ and friends’!), so if we’d gotten married later, we might have had a different kind of wedding that was more kid-friendly.
He has three kids so I am all for kids at a wedding. My opinion is that a wedding is bringing two families together and kids are part of those families!!!!!
I think it’s a personal choice. We love kids and never considered not inviting them. We even had 7 kids in our wedding party and they were adorable. We gave all the kids gift bags with dollar store games and activities in them - they loved them and it kept them busy. I got asked to dance by several boys in the 5-6 year crowd and it was a lot of fun!
My FI wasn’t really wanting kids at the wedding. However, I’m a nanny and I love kids so not having kids at the wedding would never have worked for me. Even with allowing kids we are only expecting to have 8 come. Most of our friends don’t have kids yet and we don’t have much family coming so luckily it worked out. I am also making activity books and having games to keep the kids entertained. Plus there is a playground right next to where our reception is being held. Im really looking forward to dancing with all the little ones!
I love your activity book, this was something I wanted to do, but ran out of time, oh well. We invited kids since some of my cousins are still considered kid age, Mr. P has nephews that we wanted there, and we thought it would be unfair not to invite other kids as well. Plus, they are super cute.
Miss Racoon,
Thank you so much for featuring my image on this post. I feel very honored!
As far as inviting kids to weddings, I usually wish that they let kids come to the party. Yes, I get a lot of cute pictures of kids during wedding parties. They’re just a bundle of joy! Kids and their antiques… Haha…
I have a son myself, and usually have a hard time to find someone to watch over him if it’s an adult only event. We don’t have any family or relatives that live close by.
I had one wedding last October. It was an adult only party, but they provided a hotel room with someone to watch the kids. I think that can be an alternative.
A little OT: The first novel book I read when I was little was “Frosty: A Raccoon to Remember”.
If we had all of our family kids show up and all of our friends kids-it would have put the number at a whopping 35. No way-so we had family only.
We ended up having 6 (out of 17) show up. And yea, they were kind of a distraction. Someone got upset that rap music got played in from of a 3 year old (it was the clean version, and 1030 at night mind) Another cousin was upset that there was drinking around her baby and left early. Mind you, this was more about the adults than the kids themselves. So I think it depends on the parents and how they will react.
I never would have thought to not invite kids. For me, a wedding is family coming together, meaning the entire family. I love kids, and there are alot in both families, so it would be weird to not have kids there, they are fun and make the dance floor fun! Where I live(Ca) it’s not common to have a wedding where no kids are invited, actually I have never been to a “no kids allowed” wedding.
This is such a cute book! We didn’t invite any children except for a few exceptions. Mr. BC has cousins out of state who are participating in our wedding and they have older children (8 and up). We would have had to add at least another 50 people if we were to include all children. It just doesn’t work for us. But I agree - they make for adorable pics!
Like you, we had families traveling quite a bit and so we wanted to include the children. We had a total of about 13 kids, with a total guest list of 55 so there was a fair number of them. We ended up hiring a babysitter to be with them during dinner, in a separate part of the venue, so they were entertained and could be as loud and boisterous as they wanted to be. They were well behaved during the ceremony and first dance, and were a blast during the dancing part of the evening. I have great shots of them in the photo booth and honestly, I cannot wait for my professional pictures of me and my five flower girls. They were ADORABLE!! And I found my other guests loved having them there as well. Kids are always entertaining!
It wasn’t hard at all for us. We both were like absolutely not, almost immediately. LoL. We both like kids… we just plan on having an adult event.
It was a difficult choice - but we are having children at our wedding. I think it is unfair for people to be upset if you choose not to have them. We have 48 children in our family and friends guest list. That is A LOT of extra bodies and chairs and Food for little ones who could potentially Run around Crazy and not mind the adults. I’ve seen it. However, never in one moment did we think it would be Adult only - we love our families and wanted every family member to be there, including the little cute ones and the ones that aren’t too cute. So for us it was mostly due to cost - but then… we had friends who complained and friends we of course did not want to miss out so YEA! I’m expecting about 30 of the kids to show. Oh my.. where oh where do I seat them?
We were firmly on the must have kids list. It was never a question to us. I didn’t even know ppl didn’t even kids to weddings till WB!
I never really understood not inviting kids to a wedding, when did they become the outcasts of the family? Our guest list was 125 and a whopping 1/3 of it was children under the age of 17! I can’t imagine not having each and every one of them there–they were all adorable, and on of our cousins (age 4) was THE life of the party! I don’t think he left the dance floor once =) We also did a kids table, put a bunch of crafts that I bought from Oriental Trading (cheaper than making crafts) and they were a hit as well!! I can’t imagine the night without kids!!
We chose to only allow children of the wedding party or immediate family. Like it or not, we had a budget to stick to and if we invited every child of every adult we wanted there, we would have had to cut out a huge chunk of the guest list to accommodate these kids that most of the time we don’t even know. We made the executive decision that as much as we’d like children, we’d rather celebrate the evening with a larger group of our family and friends instead of a small group of our friends and all of their kids.
we are. we kind of have to, seeing as i have one, and the folks coming who have them have kids the same age as mine. i’ll probably put out some activity-type stuff for them. not coloring though…they’ll all be younger than three.
I knew from day one that I would have children at my wedding. Why? Because I’ve been an aunt since I was 10 years old, and they just keep coming.
While most of my nieces and nephews are older-ish (14-8) there was also my littlest niece to consider- Sister BM’s 1-year-old.
I can’t express to you strongly enough how much I LOVE that little girl. The thought of her not being in our pictures… well, I just couldn’t handle that.
We also had a groomsman with adorable children, and super cute cousins…
Seriously, the kids were all perfectly well behaved and adorable. The pictures I have are priceless!
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Mrs. Raccoon, Indianapolis Age and Occupation: 22, Student Fiance's Age and Occupation: 24, Graduate Student Engagement Date: Christmas 2010 Wedding Date: January 2012 Venue: Catholic Church, Chateau Thomas Winery About Me: I'm a wholesome Midwestern girl, TV series junkie, professional shower singer, and Anglophile. I love my fiance, crock pot cooking, my cat Heepo, going for the gusto, and all things wedding. Mr. Raccoon is pretty sweet, too! He’s a mad scientist that loves to travel. We met my first night on campus and have been inseparable since.
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