Mom Of Bullied Little Girl Begs Parents To RSVP To Kids' Birthday Parties — 'All My Daughter Wanted Was For 5 Friends To Come'
The mom asked parents to be accountable and answer their kids' invitations.
Thirdman / Pexels The mom of a young girl went on TikTok to make a tearful plea to other parents about birthday party etiquette. She explained that her daughter’s birthday celebration was ruined because none of the kids she invited bothered to respond.
The mom begged other parents to send RSVPs to kids’ birthday parties.
Lacey Keighron captioned her post, “We as parents have got to do better. Being a parent is hard enough as it is. Trying to navigate through things like this makes it heartbreaking.”
“I need to tell you all that if you have kids, please RSVP to birthday parties. I’m not saying that you have to go, let them know that you’re not coming, if you’re not coming. If you’re gonna come, tell them, you’re gonna come. If you’re a maybe, let them know you might or might not. But zero responses can be heartbreaking for these kids,” Keighron said.
She explained that all her daughter wanted for her birthday was to have a pool party with five friends. Her daughter, Lillian, was homeschooled for the first half of the year and attended school in person for the second half. Keighron said that because of her daughter’s unique school situation, she didn’t have contact information for any parents. She sent her daughter to school with invitations to hand out, and not one child RSVP’d to the party.
“I let her know this morning, I haven’t heard from any of these kids. I just don’t want you to get your hopes up that they will show up without RSVPing. It would be harder on her to wait until tomorrow and have nobody show up and have her even worse off.... So we just wanted to let her know today that no one had RSVP’d.”
The emotional ramification from the lack of RSVPs was huge for Keighron's daughter.
“Our daughter has now been crying for 2 hours,” Keighron said. “I have been crying. I’m so sad for her. I don’t really know what to do for her to make it better.”
What made the birthday party debacle even worse for the young girl was that last year, her grandfather died three days before her daughter’s birthday. The family still celebrated her birthday, but the loss was palpable.
“She still got a cake, and we sang Happy Birthday to her, and she got presents, but there were a lot of tears. My dad was missing her birthday. So it wasn’t a great birthday for her,” Keighron said.
To top off that traumatic experience, Keighron’s daughter was attending a school where she was bullied on her birthday.
Keighron said that she sent cupcakes to her daughter’s school so she could celebrate with her class. “The teacher handed them out while the kids were in line for lunch. And when Lily came back from the line, it looked like her cupcake had been messed with. She thought somebody just like, poked their finger in it, so she was like, whatever, she ate it anyway, ‘cause she’s a bada– and she’s not gonna let these girls make her look like a fool. So she ate it.”
“She thought there was cream filling inside the cupcake. And when she was done eating it, those mean little girls told her that they got a piece of cheese from the trashcan and put it into her birthday cupcake,” Keighron reported. Her daughter told an administrator about the bullying incident, yet the school never informed Keighron.
“I picked my daughter up from school and she was in tears, and she proceeded to tell me what happened. I was furious. I called the school, and they were very nonchalant, ‘Oh, we watched the video, the little girl got cheese from her lunch box.’ I don’t care where the cheese came from. I mean, I’m glad it wasn’t the trash can. But why wasn’t I made aware of this? Why was my daughter bullied on her birthday and something was stuck inside her cupcake and nobody told me?”
Keighron’s daughter told her that was the worst birthday of her life, and she wanted her birthday to be better this year.
“The only thing she wanted was five friends to come and have a pool party. And normally we don’t invite friends from school over for parties, we do close family and very close friends that we know will come and RSVP and we’ll have a good time with. But I let her invite them this time because she had such an awful birthday last year.”
Ivan Samkov / Pexels
Keighron reiterated her initial point— just RSVP. “Something is better than nothing,” she said.
“So, I’m gonna go console my little girl and pull myself together so that I can try and teach her how to learn from this and grow from this and teach her that not everyone’s always gonna be there for you. Other people have lives and are busy, you know, whatever… Because had I known, I would have done something else for her,” she ended her post.
Making friends as a kid can be a challenge, even when bullying isn’t involved. Keighron’s call to action for parents to make sure they RSVP to kids’ birthday parties is a simple ask, yet it holds people accountable for their actions in the community, which is what parents should aim to teach their children to do.
Alexandra Blogier is a writer on YourTango's news and entertainment team. She covers parenting issues, pop culture analysis and all things to do with the entertainment industry.