Bride Defends Allowing Own Children to Attend Child-Free Wedding

A bride says her wedding guests were upset that her own children attended her otherwise child-free wedding.

“My partner of 12 years and I finally got married recently. We have 2 daughters together who are 10 and 2. They were the only kids at the wedding. They were only there for the ceremony, not the reception. My eldest was one of the bridesmaids and my youngest was the flower girl,” the bride shared on Reddit.

“It was made explicitly clear that our children were going to be involved in our wedding even when we were planning it and when we sent out invitations. We said on the invites ‘our family of four wants you to join us on our special day.’ It was also explicitly clear that only our kids would be the only children there and that it was a child-free wedding and they wouldn’t be at the reception,” she continued via her Reddit post.

Though she was clear with her guests before the event, she and the groom received criticism on their wedding day.

“Some people were quite vocal about how unfair it was that we had our kids at the ceremony and involved white heavily and nobody else’s,” she recalled. “The ceremony was literally about 40 minutes then my uncle took the girls back to his house as he volunteered to forgo the ceremony to look after them.”

Some of the guests complained about having to hire babysitters to watch their kids so they could attend the wedding.

“Some people were kinda pissed off that they had kids similar to my oldest one’s age or slightly older who would have been fine to come to a ceremony for a few hours. For example, some have teenagers. My husband and I feel we gave everybody enough notice; almost TWO YEARS and that it was our wedding day. Others feel differently and we are still receiving passive aggressive comments,” the bride concluded.

In the comments section, Reddit users supported the bride’s decision and backed her up.

“Your wedding, your prerogative. Your children should have definitely been there to see their parents get married,” one person wrote.

“What the heck is up with people complaining to the couple about the wedding on their wedding day?! I can’t think of anything more rude. You were clear with folks. It’s up to them to decide to attend or not,” another commented.

“It’s your wedding. You can do what you want. If you want your children there, and not others, that is 100% reasonable. It is not reasonable for anyone to question or criticize you for having your wedding the way you wanted,” someone else weighed in.