Why did you have a child-free wedding?

Thanks for your opinions everyone. I was simply curious because I don't share the feeling. It helped answer my question for sure!
Thanks all!

I am a preschool teacher, enjoy children, but want an adult-only wedding. The only exception is my niece. The main reason we aren’t inviting children is because not everyone parents using the same guidelines. What some people consider acceptable behavior is not what others consider acceptable. I do not want to feel like I am babysitting at my own wedding, and as a teacher, I am not able to just turn that off! Also, quite a few of our guests have children, so including them would significantly limit the number of adults we could invite, as our venue has limited space. The venue itself is a historic mansion and country club, so it is not a child-friendly environment.

We didnt want children throwing tantrums or babies crying. Also we wanted parents to enjoy the wedding without stressing over their kids. Also, it saved us some money to not include kids.

To Save Money , So Parents Can Enjoy Themselves Alone, To Not Have Children Running Around With Adults Drinking Alcohol.

1. Save money; 2. Couldn't tolerate my FH's neice being there while my cousins who are her age are not there.

I think we are inviting kids just because I couldn't find a tactful way to say infants could come (which I've heard is a must) but no kids 2-10, which is the ages I would really want to exclude.

I am TERRIFIED that a small child is going to scream/cry through the ceremony.

I'm also concerned about kids touching food on the app tables/putting it back and spreading germs.

We are having children at our wedding and couldn't imagine it any other way! The youngest will be 4 and she will be our flower girl. When planning our wedding from the start we made plans to include children and make it as kid friendly as possible. We plan on having yard games (corn hole, giant jenga, washers) for them and the adults to play with during cocktail hour/dancing time. There will be personalized wedding coloring books and crayons at their seats for the dinner portion and I look forward to dancing with them and all of the fun pictures we will take!

It’s not like I don’t like kids or don’t think they have a place at a wedding, that just didn’t have a place at mine. We didn’t really have any kids we were particularly close to. Everyone has to draw a line somewhere — for us it was both space and money that limited our guestlist — If we had unlimited of those, sure, everyone could’ve brought anyone. But, we had a very hard cap on space and even though we had a pretty generous budget , our per person costs were high and once we let in one kid, we’d have to invite them all which would’ve been about FORTY additional guests. Just not something we could accommodate, and ESPECIALLY not worth trying to because these aren’t people we have close personal relationships with.


THAT aside, for us there was additional liability concerns. Our wedding was on personal property, on the water. A fun place for kids to play with supervision but there were definitely concerns of what would happen if kids were playing on the dock and fell or something like that. We took our insurance for the event but even so if anything happened to one of my cousins’ kids or friends’ kids at my wedding I would’ve never forgiven myself.

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Same girl!!!!

1 for money reasons

2 like someone else said, everyone parents differently and i don't like how some kids i know are bratty and all about them, extremely loud, can't sit quietly, and so on... i refuse to have a flower girl or ring bearer since i don't trust anyone but me and my boyfriend with the rings, and don't want kids ruining the clothes or throwing a tantrum instead of walking where they need to... (i have been scarred by other friends weddings/america's funny home show videos where the kids ruined stuff.

(my siblings raised their kids right and they are quiet and will be allowed (2 siblings will have 2 infants at the time, that rarely cry) but i am not allowing my friends to bring their kids, i want them to enjoy a date with no kids, their parents/another babysitter can watch the kids... my boyfriend has a cousin that has 2 kids that will be invited, but no one else on his side has kids at this time so i don't need to worry about saying no to kids on his side. so basically family only can bring kids, but no friends...)

3 i am worried kids would finger food and put it back, as well.

I only invited kids of relatives to ours. we chose to do this because: 1) our venue was on the smaller side and we already had to cut some adult friends as it was; 2) I have never been to a wedding where I thought to myself, "you know, I'm really glad there are so many kids here;" 3) I have been to weddings that were actually disrupted by unruly kids and I did not want that; 4) we knew our friends with kids wouldn't get butthurt and would enjoy a date night out; 5) your 3-year-old does NOT care about a wedding anyway; and 6) it saved a ton of money because there would have been like 30 kids there if we had invited everyone's kids, and the price per plate was the same regardless of age.

I love kids, I love all our friends' kids, but to me a wedding is just not a place to have 30 kids running around.

1.) We had a lot of kids on both sides; and we felt it would be unfair to only invite some. That being said, we saved thousands by not inviting kids. Yes, there's that many

2.) We had an open bar and it was a fairly formal event. Kids would have changed the vibe, and we liked how it was adults only, as people didn't need to babysit their kids all night or worry about them getting into stuff

I love kids and we are expecting our first right now; but I totally understand child-free weddings and wouldn't think twice about one.

View Quoted Comment Yes; generally speaking... I associate children-free weddings as more elegant... I’ve never been to a wedding where it was black tie with children running around. Doesn’t make the day any more of any less special. 🙂 Just my two-cents!

We both come from large families
We could not even afford all basic family, never mind any friends, if we had invited kids. We did have 170 adult guests plus wedding party, about 1/3 friends, plus 15 babies in the nursery, counting the 16 year olds and up. ... We did not have the additional 167 children (15 months to 13.5 years ) who came to the wedding area with their parents. We were both on our first year working after grad school, having paid off grad school and earned enough to pay for our wedding by working an extra 24-30 hours a week in addition to our main jobs. And, we wanted a formal wedding. 167 more guests, impossible. We did have a family fay picnic and barbecue 11am to 7pm the next day, on the grounds of the same Inn, with others staying at a resort motel 200 yards away. Some of our guests had plans for the rest of Columbus day weekend. But 320 afults and children stayed for our family day, it was mostly childless friends who left, or parents who had left kids home, who did not stay. That day only cost us $3000, and our parents, and some aunts and uncles contributed the rest in kind. There were family weddings, my siblings and his, my cousins and his, in both families already that summer. But all with 1 big family marrying 1 tiny one. 150-180 adults 30-50 kids.
But 15 babies and 167 more up to age 13, no. We did not want that.

Because we don't want kids running around our wedding, plus we had to make a choice between having the adults we really wanted to attend vs. allowing everyone with kids to bring them due our budget, as we are paying for everything ourselves. Frankly, even if we could afford them, we likely still would have decided on adult only because neither of us are big on kids. We don't have any, or want any in the future. We both prefer the company of other adults, though we're also both good with kids when we do have to be around them.

If you want kids around and you can afford them along with everyone else you want, awesome. It's your wedding, so it's your choice.

I had a pretty formal Catholic wedding and didn’t want chaos through it. Our nieces and nephews were in it and came to the reception—we knew their parents would parent them.

In addition to a lot of things people above have said (increased guest counts, food cost), our reception venue is at a restaurant. The last thing I would want is kids running out of the reception area and into the main dining room where other people are enjoying a meal (which would be easy to do based on the layout of our private reception area + the main dining room). Also, the patio area next to our reception space is completely open to the entire patio of the restaurant, and there is not much of a barrier from the patio to the boardwalk & marina. I’d be a nervous wreck if kids were running around outside on the patio and down the boardwalk to see the boats.

You sound like me, my life is FULL with kiddos in it. My FH and I have one child each, both boys. I use to work as a preschool teacher also. So 90% of my friends are moms. Some of them single moms so I know how hard it was to get a sitter just to make an event. I wasn’t going to ask them to do that. I found a reception hall that was what I wanted plus affordable to feed everyone. I’m going to have activities there for the kids. I work as a nanny and my work babies are in my wedding. If they talk or cry during the ceremony....I don’t care. But that’s a good reflection of my life. My FH and I are family people, we want the kiddos involved. We are still going to have alcohol, (because come on parents drink too lol) we aren’t going to be offended if someone wants to leave a little early bc they kids are tired. But again that’s me, I would be sad if my wedding was child free. It would be very weird, bc that’s not me.

View Quoted Comment Omg I’m doing the same thing lol

A large part of it was cost and attendance. Our venue and budget could hold 100, and having everyone bring their kids (we were in our early 40's so a lot had kids at that point) would have brought us up to 150. I did have the children of the wedding party there, so 6 kids total, which was a good number. I also said nursing mothers could bring their babies and our out of country guests could bring their kids, but neither took us up on it. But our main reason echoes what some said above, which that I wanted the guests to relax and have fun without needing to rush home to attend to their children. And you know what? Several guests actually thanked us! There was one person who refused to come without her kids and we held firm (and offered known, trusted babysitters- I am also a preschool teacher and could have found some), and she has pretty much cut us off. I think a couple others were slightly peeved, but they still came, or one parent came. We had the wedding that was right for us, and we have no regrets.

A few reasons we chose a child free wedding and it was amazing.
1. Limited Guest list
2. I do not like misbehaving children. My bil and sil now have a little kid who is 2 and every sound out of his mouth is a loud screech. Yea, that was not happening at our wedding. It was on the beach and a local restaurant afterwards. 3. Reception included a bar 4. Did not have to accommodate special kids meal requests 5. Did not have to entertain children. 6. Did not want to contend with running around children. I wanted an adult affair, and when children are around they are the center of attention. 7. I had enough drunk people before my wedding , one fell off the chair and some of my mom’s friends drank before the wedding and brought their red solo cups on the beach. Drunk people are like children.
If the wedding was bigger than 50 people then I’d say sure invite the kids. But it just was not what I wanted and we had to make some cuts. My cousins didn’t even get invited even though they were of age. I just couldn’t invite any of my cousins because of capacity and budget.
I got married in Oct 21, 2017.