BellaOnline Forums Relationships Married No Kids How to maintain friendships with friends with kids

Hello there! I was wondering how everyone deals with friends who do choose to have children. What do you guys do to keep the friendship healthy and happy? I have a lot of friends who chose to have children and have very small children at the moment or are trying to get them For me, all of these friendships have changed (and for the worse). I understand it as people's priorities change. When a child is hungry or upset that is more important than a conversation with a good friend on the phone. no question about it (though frustrating for me on the other side of the line). Now that my best friend told me she wants to have children too, I am in a bit of a panic. I have CFS and am bound to home often. That makes me quite inflexible as a friend. Now that my friends have kids they are very inflexible as well. It makes me a bit lonely at times. So far I am trying to keep contact mostly through mail and email, as phonecalls get disturbed (and people never return the call after a child has interrupted it or so it seems) and as my friends live too far away for me to have enough energy to visit them easily. But as I keep trying very hard, I am noticing that deep down I am becoming frustrated and irritated because I simply am fed up with all the babytalk, especially talk about children's problems, diapers, illnesses and so on all the time. I feel very bad about it, like I am a bad friend, not social or empathic. By nature I am very empathic and usually I do not mind listening to people's problems at all. As a psychologist it is my work and I love being there for people. All in all, has anyone of you got some tips about friendships with friends who do have kids? I am trying to see my own part in this and try to see if there is something I may be overlooking. :confused:

Hi Faeryqueen-

I completely understand how you feel! During my college years, I was under the impression that distance was the biggest strain on any friendship. I now know that distance is a drop in the ocean compared to the strain that children place on friendships. All i know is that once a friend becomes a mother, our friendship will never be the same again. It's sad, it's painfull, but it's true.

I don't think you are overlooking anything! You are NOT a bad friend. When a woman has a baby, that baby is the most important thing in her life. So, for people like you and me who have no interest in "baby talk" it makes maintaing a friendship very difficult...and in some cases, impossible! (at least for me)

Good luck!

Faeryqueen,

Absolutely agree with on_a_roll -- friendships take a hit when your friends have kids. From 2006-today, 90% of my friends became mothers for the first time. These women were much like me: married for about the same amount of time (I've been married for 8 yrs), had careers, went on double-dates every once and a while on a weekend. Overnight, motherhood turned them into stay-at-home moms who barely have any life or time outside of "baby-dom". A lot of these friends feel like they don't have any business talking to me anymore (since I don't share the commonality of children), while a very few (2 or 3) do actually make the effort to be interested in my life. As uninterested in children as I am, I try to be polite and do the right thing by asking them questions about their babies, but often-times I get more information than I care to hear about. Then you have distance yourself from them a little. Once a friend becomes a mother, you can't circumvent the conversations about her children. Mothers do get better about this as their children get older, but the fact is that she will talk routinely about her kids for the rest of her life.

The best advice I can give is to 1)lean on us MNK people (because we feel your frustration!), and 2)really treasure those mother-friends that do take an interest in you. If they fall into any trouble, be there for them. Show them that you appreciate their openmindedness about your CF status.

I agree with the others. A friendship changes when a friend becomes a mother.

Right now I can't even plan weekend outings with the mothers I know either because their children are too young to tag along or they don't have the money to go out. My cousin in law can't go to many places since her son is disabled but I invite her anyway even though I know she can't come, just to be polite.
Fortunately I have some family members who are single or dating without kids who are willing to tag along our outings with us. But I know there will come a day when they'll start popping out kiddies too.

The phone thing is annoying. Every single time we're in the middle of a conversation, the kids start acting up. After we say our goodbyes, I never get a call back. So now, I don't even bother calling, I just text.

I used to talk to my cousin all the time and now that she has a 4 month old baby, we rarely talk at all. And the baby usually interrupts. I wish things were different but that's the way it is.

Oh well. Not much we can do. Maybe it would be best to try and look for older or younger people who either don't want kids, don't have kids or have already raised their kids. I'm pretty anti-social so I don't think finding new friends is going to work for me. I'm happy enough just doing things with hubby anyway.

My advice is to enjoy those moments when you do get to talk to your friends. Get as much said as you possibly can and don't expect them to remember much of it.

I quit my job back in April, and I had tried to tell a good friend of mine, but every time I called her or she called me, we'd start talking for 2 minutes, and then one of her kids would need something or she'd have to get off the phone. She called me Tuesday wanting to know if I was at this big meeting and could she sit with me. Well, I was in the shower after my morning run and wasn't at the meeting because I had quit my job. So I called her back and finally got a chance to tell her. Every other time I tried to tell her, she had to get off the phone right away and we never could really get a conversation in. I hated telling her on her voicemail, but I didn't have a choice.

I try to call my friends with kids, and I always leave a message. Mainly because they won't have time to look at the Caller ID. I've discovered that they will listen to messages and will respond (in most cases). It might be a week before they call back though. Depending on how many kids they have, I sometimes drop everything I'm doing when they call because I know I won't get another chance to talk to them for like a month or so. But if they only have 1 or 2 kids, then I call back after the kiddos go to bed. Find out when dinner is, when bedtime is, when is the latest you can call before they get aggravated, etc. Don't call 20 minutes before dinner because they're prepping it or tryign to get kids to do homework. And don't call right before bedtime.

Just talk to your friends and try to figure it out. I'm still friends with a few of my friends with kids. Others have now become acquaintances, and some I have lost complete contact with. I've done my part, but they seem to want to hang out with other moms instead of me. That's fine with me. It is painful at first, but that's something I'll have to live with.

Sadly I feel I have gone out of my way to make friends with people that dont have children. I have recently moved with my husband to a new city and have gone out of the way to do so. It is hard to maintain friendships like that when ultimately you wont have much in common. I find it very refreshing that there are other people like me out there.

I love this place!

So glad to hear I'm not the only one who feels this way. And, yes the phone thing is very annoying.

Beth- I am so with you about getting more information than I want to hear about. I think mothers lose some of their filtering skills and just share every little bit of information with everyone.

Hey there, I am so glad to have "met" you all! I felt truly terrible about being so frustrated. And now I know I am not the only one experiencing this. My best friend and I had some good talks about this and so she knows how I feel. I will do my best to support her and once a baby is on its way to stand by her (especially as I feel her botfriend won't do a good job at it) as she is my very best friend and a very spiritual person. But I do know she is not very realistic about the boundaries children pose and the strains they put on a friendship. My second best friend has two boys. I did my best to make a connection. I am a creative person so I made them customised name signs for their doors and one of them loved a dolphin painting in our house so I made a small one for him. The thing is...I have a hard time liking her kids and I feel sooooo guilty. She is a very caring mother, but overprotective. Her son is highly sensitive, but even being highly sensitive myself does not help. It probably has more to do with how she treats her kids and the nervousness that brings about. I do know she tries her very best to stay in contact and the only thing I should do is try to keep that in mind. It does indeed hurt when they all are in contact on a facebooklike site making dates to visit eachother with the kids and I just look on and stand by. Lotte, I do not know where to find people that are like me in my own area either (escpecially as I have CFS and am not that mobile). I have two aquaintances who do not have children (one by choice, the other because she cannot seem to find a partner) and one new friend but she lives very far away and might get children as soon as she finds a good man. But they are people I have less in common with overall. And it is not an issue for them like it is for the others on the forum here. By the way Lotte, I thought it was very harsch of your husband to throw that in your face! If you do not want kids and he does, that is truly painful as it is, but when you are hurting when you miss your friends as they were before, he should support you and not throw it in your face. There is no excuse of making you hurt even more. Where do you live? Your name sounds Dutch (I am from the Netherlands and it is quite a common name here) Thank you everyone!! Faeryqueen

Hi Faeryqueen, For me too is difficult to find CF friends to hang out in my city, most around my age are either with kids or planning to, so in a different way of thinking. I have 2 CF friends but they are desperate to find a man and have kids, so they are not such a good company unfortunately... I live in Brussels, where in the NL are you?