Do you make your kids play with everyone?

Sometimes my kids (11 and 6) just want to spend time with friends they feel closer with whom they don’t get as much opportunity to play.

My neighbor’s kid comes over every day to play uninvited and she has a dominating personality and can sometimes be controlling, and the kids sometimes feel smothered by her. I’ve told mine that it’s fine if they just want to play with certain friends sometimes, but not to say no every single time. The friends they’re close with don’t particularly like having her around either. Yesterday afternoon the neighbor’s kid came and asked if she could play with everyone, and I told her they were spending some time just them for a while, but maybe another day.

That’s after my daughter had played with her all morning. Well, she ended up hanging out in her yard giving nasty looks and accused the other kids of lying to her all week about not being able to play because one of them was sick. She even wrote a note saying that it wasn’t fair that they were playing with my kids. The way she kept spying on my kids was so odd. It appears she’s not used to being told no by her parents either.

We want our kids to feel secure enough to know that if someone doesn’t want to play with you all the time, it doesn’t mean they don’t like you. As adults, we don’t invite all of our mutual friends over at the same time. Sometimes one mutual friend will make special plans with another, and we won’t be included, and that’s okay. It’s just hard because we are the only parents in the neighborhood who aren’t forcing kids to include each other all the time.

Do you think it’s okay for kids to “exclude” others during play? How can you draw the line at kids playing with everyone but still not come off as mean? I’m struggling with this.