I'm kind of puzzled by the weddings reference in the letter as, in my experience, weddings are rare. Including my own, I don't think I've been to more than a dozen in the twenty-five years I've been married. They've been slightly more common than funerals (which is likely to change in the next 5-10 years as our parents and their siblings are all over 70), but family weddings carry the same weight of obligation as things that come before anything fun because we may not see those people again for many years. Or at all.
I have less experience with weddings of friends (I can think of four in that quarter century and doubt I'm forgetting all that many) and none at all with weddings of coworkers or more tenuously connected people. Each added guest at a wedding jacks up the cost considerably, so people don't invite people unless they either really want them there or absolutely have to (or they're willing to blow a lot of money to show that they have it to blow).
At any rate, I'd consider missing a wedding to be a serious thing for the father to do. Taking the kids or not depends on who is getting married and how old the kids are (since there's no mention of the expense/lavishness of the son's bar mitzvah, I'm assuming he's the younger child). Generally speaking, in my family, children aren't an assumed part of a wedding invitation. If they're present, it's because they were explicitly asked which means providing an explanation if they don't attend.
The LW is an asshole, but weddings are potentially really important things, and a guest has a choice between attending a once in a lifetime event for someone they're connected to and not attending that event. A guest can't change the date/time or venue, and I've never been invited to a wedding that wasn't on a Saturday afternoon.
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I have less experience with weddings of friends (I can think of four in that quarter century and doubt I'm forgetting all that many) and none at all with weddings of coworkers or more tenuously connected people. Each added guest at a wedding jacks up the cost considerably, so people don't invite people unless they either really want them there or absolutely have to (or they're willing to blow a lot of money to show that they have it to blow).
At any rate, I'd consider missing a wedding to be a serious thing for the father to do. Taking the kids or not depends on who is getting married and how old the kids are (since there's no mention of the expense/lavishness of the son's bar mitzvah, I'm assuming he's the younger child). Generally speaking, in my family, children aren't an assumed part of a wedding invitation. If they're present, it's because they were explicitly asked which means providing an explanation if they don't attend.
The LW is an asshole, but weddings are potentially really important things, and a guest has a choice between attending a once in a lifetime event for someone they're connected to and not attending that event. A guest can't change the date/time or venue, and I've never been invited to a wedding that wasn't on a Saturday afternoon.