This is why we never had parties for DS after this happened the one time we tried it.. He does have mild Asperger's, and grade school was extremely hard for him socially. He's now 17, and he has been invited to exactly ONE official party in his entire life. (One of the girls in his kindergarten class invited the entire class so he did get an invitation that one time.) He does hang out with friends at their homes sometimes these days, and he will call that a party, but it really isn't one; just a handful of kids playing video games and ordering in pizza; nothing really planned.
It had also happened to me as a child, and I remembered how much it hurt. My parents switched over to the "special family outing" method of birthday celebration, and I felt we should do that, too, but when DS was in first grade DH insisted that he should be able to have a party like other kids; that maybe he wasn't getting invited because he had never had a party of his own. He was in Cub Scouts so we invited them and all of the boys in his class, in the hope that at least a couple of them would show up. No such luck. When it became clear that we were getting no guests we actually went door to door in the neighborhood to see if we could find kids to come (there were no other boys his age in our neighborhood; all girls.) In the end we managed to round up 6 children, mostly girls and most a bit older or younger, but he was just so thrilled to have other kids come to the house that it kind of worked out OK. I'll tell you that even when we knocked on the doors of neighbors we had never met, more that one child responded to his parent's asking by saying, "you mean that weird kid? No way." The schoolyard grapevine had been at work; the only kids who agreed to come were some who had never met him, and only the girls ever deigned to play with him on any other occasions.
The invitations for the Cub Scout troop had been given out at a meeting, and we later discovered that every single one of them had been thrown away in the trash can outside the meeting room; their parents never even knew about the party (we found that out when DS teacher called us the Monday after the party to say that DS had come in from his afternoon class chore in tears. She had sent him to empty the classroom recycling can into the dumpster, and he saw the whole pile of invitations right on top, where they had landed when the janitor had emptied the big community room can. It was a parochial school, and the church and school shared the dumpster.)
Asperger's tends to come along with a lack of physical coordination that lasts quite a long time; for that reason most younger Aspies will shy away from team sports because they get teased for being so bad at them. They tend more to do things like martial arts if they do a sport at all. This makes it doubly hard for boys to make friends, because so much of boys' social lives these days revolve around organized sports.
Our family tradition for DS birthday since then has been to take the family to WDW; somehow he's OK with that.
Sheesh.....I'm trying to NOT make any child feel bad.
