I was in the middle of painting a ceiling when I remembered that one of my children was at a friend’s birthday party and had to be collected by five o’clock.

I threw an anorak over my paint-splattered sweatshirt and rushed out. I must have looked like the bedraggled mum in the old Flash ad who was always late to the school gates because her cheap inferior washing powder left suds all over the floor.

The usual drill with kids’ parties is that you turn up for the handover, politely decline a glass of wine or a cup of coffee, make small talk on the doorstep for several minutes while your nipper dawdles about sourcing shoes and coats, and then pray they don’t embarrass you by promptly ripping open the goodie bag and wailing: “Yuk, I hate those jellies from the ¤2 shop!”

Not this time, though. As soon as the door opened I was hauled inside, handed a glass of pink champagne with a fresh strawberry perched on the rim of the Louise Kennedy crystal flute, and steered into a room where an under-12s accompanied cocktail soirée was in full swing. In fact it was all going reasonably swimmingly until the hostess arrived and absolutely insisted, with menaces, on confiscating my anorak.

I suspect it’s only in the pages of Enid Blyton that children’s parties are just about children, with the adults’ only role to provide macaroons and ginger beer and then make themselves scarce. Nobody worried about e-numbers, gluten intolerance or organic fare when the Famous Five packed a picnic to go exploring mysterious caverns.

But since we can’t trust children to amuse themselves anymore, it stands to reason that their birthday parties have also become projects that require intense adult management, to be scheduled and planned with almost as much care, attention and expense as a small family wedding.

Just like family weddings, birthday parties can be as much about the parents’ desire to show off their affluence/culinary taste/new kitchen as about celebrating the guest of honour. It’s a chance to entertain, network with, and impress the sort of people who would never otherwise dampen your guest towels.

How else do you explain the rush of enthusiasm, in the prosperous early noughties, for ever more elaborate acts, performers, trips and shows for the amusement of kids who just wanted to be left to play with their friends and eat too many Rice Krispie buns? I’ve heard of travelling zoos, full-scale magic shows and skittle-juggling, balloon-twisting, fire-eating clowns turning up to terrorise five-year-olds at house parties. As for extravagant goody bags, remember the story of the embarrassed mum who rang the hostess to say her youngster had stolen the young birthday boy’s mini-disc player, only to be told it was his going-home gift?

Most teachers will tell you they’ve got rules on how and when invitations are to be distributed, how exclusions are to be dealt with, and whether gifts can be exchanged in school. But children have been having birthday parties for years without the need for formal guidelines. It’s only since prosperous, touchy and politically correct adults seized these innocent little events as opportunities for grandstanding that the business became depressingly regulated and, not surprisingly, litigious.

Sweden is currently riven by a fierce debate over children’s party rules. No less an authority than the Parliamentary Ombudsman has been asked to adjudicate on a row that blew up after an eight-year-old child omitted two classmates from his birthday party guest list. His school, apparently, had a policy that said every child must be included. When the teacher saw that two boys had been left off the list, she confiscated all the invites and notified the principal.

The birthday boy’s father has filed a complaint with the Ombudsman, and claims that his son’s basic human right to free association has been trampled into the dust. But the school insists that the uninvited boys are the victims here, as they’ve been made to feel “left out and sad”. Having some knowledge of eight-year-old boys, I doubt that very much. I reckon it’s their parents who feel “left out and sad”. Not only are they missing the post-party soirée, but they’ve also been singled out, judged, excluded and humiliated.

Let’s be honest: it is to appease prickly parents, rather than to mollify excluded children, that schools have laid down birthday-party rules. Children know the rules already: you don’t invite anybody you don’t like, and you don’t expect to be asked to a party, or a play date, or a sleepover, by a child who doesn’t like you. What part of that equation don’t parents understand?

In the Swedish case, the birthday boy left those two classmates off his list for valid reasons. One had bullied him for months, the other had excluded him from a previous party. These children did not like each other. And they are entitled not to like each other, just as adults are not obliged to embrace and entertain every single workmate or neighbour. If you fancy a few drinks after work on a Friday evening, you don’t have to invite every last colleague for fear of being greeted by a summons to an equality tribunal first thing Monday morning. At least, not yet.

Yes, those children should have been invited, as an exercise in tact and diplomacy, but I suspect it’s the adults who have the biggest problem here.

In 10 years of having children in primary school I can’t remember any occasion when one of them complained of feeling “left out and sad” because they hadn’t been invited to a classmate’s party. Not that it didn’t happen, and not that they weren’t miffed or disappointed to be excluded if their friends were on the guest list. The crucial point is they weren’t looking for me, or indeed the school, to do something about it. Because those are the rules — if you don’t get on with a classmate and you don’t play together, then you don’t expect an invitation and you don’t issue one either.

It’s silly of adults to get involved in schoolyard points scoring, while a deliberate snub is plain rude. You shouldn’t need school rules on children’s party etiquette to know it’s foolish to encourage bad manners and poor social skills in your child — getting on in life, after all, involves getting on with people you don’t like. Then why, in heaven’s name, do so many schools feel it’s the adults who need their hands held here?

brenda.power@sunday-times.ie