Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. Now we're going to reprise just for one segment, a series we did during the summer that a lot of people really liked. We partnered with Jenée Desmond-Harris, also known as the advice columnist Dear Prudence on Slate. Like we did in the summer, we invited you to write your question seeking advice to the Dear Prudence inbox at Slate.

We've picked one to read and discuss right now that we think might inform a choice that many of you will have to make or to help someone you care about make at some point. It's about the guest list for a wedding. We'll read the whole thing in a second, the whole letter. Before we do, I want you to know that as we did in the summer, we will crowdsource this advice, which means we will open the phones for you to answer the question and see if you can be even more helpful than Jenée or me.

First, let's welcome Jenée back to the show, Jenée Desmond-Harris, AKA Dear Prudence from Slate. She was previously a senior staff opinion section editor at the New York Times, has written for other news organizations, including Vox and The Root, and has a law degree from Harvard, so don't argue with her because you'll probably lose. Jenée, great to have you again. Welcome back to WNYC.

Jenée Desmond-Harris: Thank you for that intro. I'm so happy to be back with you and your listeners. This was really fun last time,

Brian Lehrer: Let's get right to this letter, which our producer, Mary Croke, has recorded the text of for us all to hear.

Karen: My niece recently has become engaged. They decided kids would not be invited to the wedding because the venue at NYC is too expensive and has a capacity of 180. They mentioned on the save-the-date notice to check the website for details, but people, for the most part didn't look. When people finally read the fine print, several were very surprised and hurt and felt disrespected. They even went so far as to wonder if their kids were even liked by the engaged couple. How could they have handled this situation differently as to not offend their wedding guests?

Brian Lehrer: Karen in Connecticut wrote that letter, Brian Lehrer Show listener, who wrote to the Dear Prudence inbox at Slate with that question just a few days ago. All right, listeners, who wants to answer the question? How could that have been handled better? Are you obligated to invite the kids to a wedding if you're inviting their parents? More broadly, what are wedding guests for? What's the purpose of having anyone at your wedding?

Is it for the sake of the couple or is it not just for the pleasure of the couple? 212-433-WNYC. Who's got advice? Who's got an opinion? 212-433-9692 if you want to chime in. The main purpose of which really is to offer advice to the next couple to avoid this kind of conflict. I wonder if anyone listening right now, I'm going to throw in this one other piece of it, has any regrets about your own wedding guest list? Does this issue ever actually come back to haunt? Probably there were more people, Jenée who regret that someone was there, who they did invite, who acted like a jerk at their wedding, but that's another show

Jenée Desmond-Harris: Based on my inbox, absolutely right.

Brian Lehrer: 212-433-9692. Jenée, I guess I'll start and I'll get into some deeper thoughts in a minute, as of course, will you. First of all, on the simplest level, this was a communication fail. If the no-kids policy was in the main body of the invitation, not in the fine print that people had to go to a website to see as the letter writer described it, there may have been no blowback to deal with. People might have understood the money issue. Money matters, obviously. Not everybody can afford everything. 180 guests is already understandably a lot. A communication fail is my first line of thought. Where would you like to start?

Jenée Desmond-Harris: I think the communications could have been clearer, but I also think the expectation is that the people who are named on the invitation are the ones who are invited. I even looked up an old Miss Manners column on this just to make sure I wasn't off base. She said in 2007, technically, all you need to do is issue your invitations in the names of the parents. That should be enough for them to understand that their children are not included.

Brian Lehrer: Yes, that's a good point. On the receiving end, those people who felt offended or disrespected maybe should have known what the standard protocol is By the way, who has 180 close adults to invite you wedding anyway?

Jenée Desmond-Harris: It's funny, Karen included that number as if it meant it was a very tiny venue. 180 is actually a lot. I appreciate where she's coming from in this letter. I can tell that she genuinely wants everyone in the family to feel good about the event and avoid hurting feelings. I think how could the bride and groom have handled this differently to avoid offending family members is actually the wrong question. The right one to me is how could the family members have handled it differently to avoid being offended?

Brian Lehrer: Yes, and I see a few questions implied here as I indicated in the invite to the listeners to call in. One is the straightforward one, if you invite the parents to a wedding, do you need to invite their kids? Maybe it matters how close they are in relation to the kids. First cousin kids might be a different category from your college roommate kids and things like that.

Also, I do have this larger question of what's the purpose of guests at a wedding? Is it mostly like you deserve the right to have fun at your own party, so except for the immediate family, of course, you have to invite unless you're estranged, only have the people there who you want there to make your wedding fun for you? Or is the purpose of wedding guests something bigger than yourselves, since one purpose of a wedding is the ceremonial act that's supposed to help cement two communities of people together?

Jenée Desmond-Harris: Exactly. Whenever I answer questions about weddings, I have to acknowledge that the norms and expectations around them vary so much with generations, with culture, with region of the country, and even with individual family traditions. I know that if I received a wedding invitation that said, “No children,” that would be completely normal to me. I'm willing to acknowledge that in this family of children are typically invited. If weddings are typically seen as important family bonding events, almost like a reunion, it could be a little offensive or shocking.

Brian Lehrer: Jacob in East Harlem, you're on WNYC. Hi Jacob.

Jacob: Hi Brian. Very excited to be on the air and talk about this. I got married last year in New York City, and yes, it is very expensive. We also did not have children at our wedding except for our immediate family members like my sister, actually, both my sisters. This was received quite well by our guests. The way we communicated it was as you both had mentioned earlier, was we just thought it was clear to have it on the invitation. It didn't say, “And family,” so we thought that made it clear. We also put it on our website.

The general gist of what we were trying to get at was that we wanted our guests to have a good time, to be able to let loose if they wanted. As I said to your screener people love their children. They obviously started a family for a reason, but sometimes you just need a night off and you just want to dance, maybe relax a little, let your hair down and we achieved that. I don't think anyone was offended. We didn't hear anything through the grapevine but yes.

Brian Lehrer: Yes, maybe just from good communication. The way you put it, Jacob made me think maybe instead of giving away a wedding favor like people do, like, I don't know, you take home the napkin from your table that say, “Jacob and spouse’s wedding 2022,” you could spring for free babysitting for everybody in a big kid's room down the hall.

Jacob: If we could have afforded it in our budget, we absolutely would've done something like that. We even thought about, how do we find a babysitter to recommend to people? At the end of the day, it might be harsh to say, “It's not really-

Brian Lehrer: Not your responsibility.

Jacob: -our problem,” right?

Brian Lehrer: Yes. Jacob, thank you. Thank you very much and congratulations on your wedding. Jenée, I know somebody who actually did that once at their wedding. There was a kid's room with the kids' tables. They hired, I don't know, if it was one or more than one supervisors, babysitters to be with the kids in the kids' room so the parents could have some fun without the kids tugging at them constantly, but the kids were invited.

Jenée Desmond-Harris: I think that's the perfect solution if you have the time and budget for it. I can also imagine a lot of couples looking at those wedding expenses. They get out of control so quickly and trying to decide, “Do we want an extra hour of an open bar or do we want to open a daycare center for three hours?” and they might choose the alcohol.

Brian Lehrer: Victor in Queens, you're on WNYC. Hi Victor.

Victor: Hi, how are you? Good long-time listener. Thank you.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you.

Victor: I had two regrets at my wedding. We had 120 guests, 60 from my side, 60 from my wife's side. My wife thought it was very strict and she needed one extra one and I had an extra one, but she didn't ask and we didn't-- so she left some people out. That was one of the regrets. The other one was--

Brian Lehrer: The people who were- -marginal on your list, you wish you had invited some of them?

Victor: Oh, my wife's side. We invited everybody on my side that we could and my wife missed out. A couple had to stay out because she was short one or two guest spots. The other regret was that I suggested mixing the tables, half my family, half her family. It would've been a good opportunity for the families to get to know each other at least a little bit. My wife and my mother objected. It's like, "No, how can you do that? It shouldn't happen," and so we didn't and I regret. Later on, I’m thinking it would have been great.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you. Thank you for your call and thank you for your candor, really. Jenée, do you ever hear that one before? I know you get a lot of wedding questions at Slate as Dear Prudence. What about that thing that Victor just brought up about mixing family members at the same table rather than my cousins and my aunts and their cousins and their aunts,

Jenée Desmond-Harris: I'm completely in support of mixing people because I think weddings first and foremost are for the couple to have the day they want but right after that, they are for building a community around the couple. I think one of the most special and powerful things about weddings is that suddenly your friends and relatives know each other. Your uncle knows your high school friend. Your grandmother knows your best friends dating partner. Suddenly when all of your loved ones have had a chance to bond with each other and recognize each other and maybe become friends on social media, it really does make you feel like you're surrounded by a much tighter community. Anything that can support them making those connections, I think is a great idea.

Brian Lehrer: Catherine in Ridgewood, you're on WNYC, and I always have to say it's Ridgewood Queens or New Jersey, in this case, New Jersey. Hi Catherine.

Catherine: Hi. How are you? We recently had a wedding where we managed through this issue. I was the mother-in-law or the mother and the mother-in-law. First of all, I want to say that having children at a wedding, particularly if you're going to have like three, four, or five or more sets a very different tone for the wedding than what the couple or quite frankly, other guests might want.

What we ended up doing was we invited the children to come to the wedding itself and then the brief cocktail hour afterwards, but then the children went to their babysitters for the reception itself. Because at the end of the day, I agree with your guests that this is really something for the couple more so than the families and I think this is an issue that the families need to handle differently rather than the couple.

Brian Lehrer: Interesting. Catherine, thank you. Nobody objected in your case it sounds like.

Catherine: No, I will say also that the bride and groom went out of their way to tell people, have the conversation with people ahead of time that children were not going to be invited to the reception. That was helpful than just having it sprung at the on the website or on the invitation because it was also a wedding where people had to travel.

Brian Lehrer: Right. Again, good communication matters. One more story, Rachel and Westbury, you're on WNYC. Hi Rachel.

Rachel: Hi. Good afternoon. How are you?

Brian Lehrer: Good, thank you. I see you got married just a couple of years ago?

Rachel: Yes, I got married thankfully before the pandemic started in 2020. My husband and I decided that we did not want children in attendance at the wedding just because we felt like we wanted to give our guests an opportunity to fully enjoy the experience and to have a very specific tone for how much fun everybody was going to have. What we did was we addressed our invitations out to maybe the wife and the husband, husband, and we put the number on the back of the RSVP to say only two members of the household.

Now we specifically also wrote it in on our website that we didn't want children but people brought them anyway. That annoyed me, but I understand that people have a hard time securing childcare, but you also have to understand that weddings have become extremely more expensive than they were before maybe back in the day. At this point, if you're paying for a child's plate, it's half of the price of a regular person's plate and that child might not be eating. They might be sleepy. They might be tired. There's just so many extra things that come along with that and I don't feel like anybody should be offended if people don't necessarily want your children to come somewhere.

Brian Lehrer: Now, did you just say that you told people no kids and some people brought their kids anyway or that you gave them the choice of any two members from your household and some chose one adult and one child?

Rachel: No. I put two members and I addressed that invitation out to like Mary and John and I put two, but some people addressed it for Mary and John for two, and then they brought a baby anyway.

Brian Lehrer: Oh.

Rachel: [laughs]

Brian Lehrer: Oh, well a baby. Rachel, thank you very much. Baby is yet another question, Jenée, right? If you have a three-month-old who you're nursing, I don't know, maybe they're not up to the babysitter stage yet and maybe there should be communication about that and there should be some exceptions.

Jenée Desmond-Harris: Yes, I think there are some gray areas and there's room for exceptions and compromises. I think for my wedding, we said something like, "We'd like for the wedding to be adults only, but if this makes things tough for you, get in touch and we'll work something out." We ended up with a small handful of children instead of half a wedding full of children.

Brian Lehrer: Yes. I guess I was wondering, and this will be my last thought and you can give a last thought of yours about the adult guests who objected to their kids not being invited. In the case of the letter, I'm trying to envision what the most meaningful of that objection would've been. Was it that they want the next generation to have this shared experience of a family gathering that they probably remember for the rest of their lives and that would help cement close ties? Was it just about the expense of babysitters, which is a real expense? Maybe it was not as profound as cementing the relationships. Maybe it was just, “My kids are part of the family and deserve to get a seat.”

Jenée Desmond-Harris: Right.

Brian Lehrer: Very different motivations.

Jenée Desmond-Harris: Exactly. I would say to people who are struggling with issues like this, thinking about what do you owe to wedding guests. I think what you owe them is, number one, clear communication about logistics, number two, a place to sit, number three, the opportunity to watch you take your vows, and number four, food and drink. Anything past that is optional and you shouldn't allow people to let you stress out about it. To guests who don't like some aspect of what's being offered at a wedding, it's always okay to RSVP no and send a gift.

Brian Lehrer: Jenée Desmond-Harris is also known these days as Dear Prudence, or as she often goes in the friendlier, more familiar Prudie at Slate.com in print and on the Dear Prudence Podcast. Great to do this with you again, Jenée. Hopefully we help to avoid some future wedding politics for some of our listeners.

Jenée Desmond-Harris: I hope so. Thanks for having me on again.

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