Why some friendships end after kids come into the picture
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Back then, I often had to skip parties or show up at events with a toddler in tow. Some friends drifted away, but the true ones stuck around. They’d hang out with us, sometimes just chilling in the basement, tossing a one-year-old on their knees, while we were all still barely out of adolescence and rocking Guns N' Roses T-shirts.
Over time, those same friends had kids of their own, and naturally, life pulled us in different directions, careers, families, obligations… all the grown-up stuff. But as others here have commented, real friendships don’t vanish. The time spent together may change, but the connection remains.
Now that the kids are grown, those same teenage friends and I get together more often. What I’ve learned is this: don’t cling too tightly to friendships that can’t adapt to your circumstances. The right people will walk with you through different stages of life. And new ones will appear when you least expect them. Hope that helps.
And yes, agree that BBQs are great opportunities when shared. Parenthood doesn’t have to mean social exile.
My __theory__ is that relationships require mutual investment. There are few of them because it's too costly for people to develop them in senses of time/focus, money, and general effort. Society asks for a lot and affords few opportunities to connect with others.
Your comment is aligned with one of my favorite books on relationships, which I’m sure many here are familiar with: How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie. It’s shaped my mindset in many areas of life, especially when it comes to building and sustaining meaningful connections.
And you’re absolutely right—modern life can be brutal when it comes to creating space for those kinds of relationships. That’s something we don’t acknowledge nearly enough.
In my experience, people with kids go into a black hole socially and hardly ever reach out to do something together. Said otherwise: I always have to make an effort to go visit them, they never come visit me.
To a certain extent that is understandable, but to put the moral responsibility on the childless for keeping relationships intact is wrong.
Most people who have kids actively and consciously choose for them and the consequences of having to care for them. In those cases they effectively also choose that over spending time with friends. I would argue that they are then thus more to 'blame' for friendships 'dying' (although I would just say people grow apart by choosing different paths in life, which isn't as antagonistic as using terms as 'true friends').
I won’t pretend I carried the full weight of maintaining every friendship. I was young, overwhelmed, and then came the career and everything else life throws at you. But with the friends who were there through thick and thin, I did make the effort to stay in touch, because a stronger bond had been forged.
And just to be clear, I wasn't placing blame on friends without children. Whether it’s kids, pets, demanding jobs, or anything else, none of us gets a free pass. Relationships need to be nourished, or they fade. For example, when we did movie nights, we made an effort to include everyone who wanted to join. If the film was age-appropriate, our little one came along, and no one minded. If not, we’d arrange a babysitter. We genuinely tried to stay connected, not just with our closest friends, but even with those we casually saw.
So to answer your question, yes, we made as much effort as we could to maintain friendships, which I think we both agree is the key message. My original post was simply a reflection on those who chose to stay connected despite the shift, not a judgment on those who didn’t.
You're right that effort needs to come from both sides, and I agree that some parents, for whatever reasons, do unintentionally withdraw from friendships. I can only speak from my own experience, where we genuinely tried to stay connected, but I understand how it might have felt one-sided to others.
In the end, people do grow apart for all kinds of reasons, and that doesn’t necessarily make anyone the villain.
Thanks again for the thoughtful pushback; it helped me better reflect on what I was trying to express.
Now I do make an effort and will continue to visit friends and family with kids, but it is a much shittier experience than visiting friends and family that don't have kids. The children dictate way too much of the experience and suck up all the attention in the room (although this is also an artifact of modern Western parenting).
Again though: the parents chose that life. I had absolutely no say in it. So the situation is that I (have to) put more effort into our relationship and they put less into it. Due to the choices they made.
So don't try to make me feel bad for not feeling sorry for them or being tempted to choose social outings that are free from temper tantrums, brightly colored plastic toys, short attention spans and uninteresting conversations about how 'they can already do multiplication'. We all make our choices.
"Such a friend"? What do you mean?
> Which is also a choice, just based on something different than what you think.
Don't be passive aggressive. Just say what you mean.
An alternative view: a friendship is a relationship where you help each other grow as people socially and emotionally. A mutual effort.
Having kids in the western world is a choice not something that happens to you out of your control. I take some issue in the way you describe your "friendship" as it seemed to revolve around your needs imo. It's fine if your friends were fine with that, but they shouldn't be described as "bad friends" just because they chose not to bend their limited time around a situation that you fully chose to be in. Not wanting to be around kids does not make it a "not real friendship". You just have incompatible values and there is nothing wrong with that.
If you choose to make yourself less available by having kids, aren't you the not 'real' friend based on your view? They gave up some of their limited youthhood time away from activities suitable for them just to get stuck in a basement. For you. You got all the benefits of raising a kid plus having friends bending to your schedule. But you didn't seem to have returned the gesture. And if you did, you didn't mention it.
Imagine if one of your friends was working crazy hard on becoming a popular musician, paid tons of money to enter a 10 year education program path and was practising all the time, and either they don't come to your social events, if they do they come with their instrument and make you listen to it or you have to come to their recitals to be able to interact with them. They could argue that you are a bad friend for choosing to see them very little or not all, but you could argue back that they made a decision to invest most of their time into something other than your friendship and their time investments are a reflection of their value rankings.
It's not too dissimilar to single parents in the dating market complaining of people going away when the find out they got a kid or people interested in dating but not in playing a parental role.
You put a price on the friendship when you chose to make yourself less available, you can't complain when people leave you if they wish to be with someone who values their friendship more than you do (ie investing more of their limited time in seeing you in ways that don't revolve around your needs solely).
In my case, I didn’t choose to become a parent—life did that for me—and I adapted. Expecting all my friends to adapt too, in hindsight, was probably selfish. But my point was that the friendships that endured were the ones where both sides did their best to make it work. Those friends could have easily chosen the cooler parties, but instead, they hung out watching Teletubbies with us. That meant something.
I'm just reflecting on how some friendships adapt and grow, while others naturally fade. No judgment either way. Just sharing my experience. Thanks for the thoughtful comment.
As an example, my close friend group initially bonded over going out to eat at fancy restaurants, bars, and traveling all over the world. When many of them started having kids, our shared activities shifted more towards cookouts at each other's homes, kid-friendly breweries with playgrounds, and trips closer to home where we can rent a big house with things for the kids to do.
I think whether friends can make this transition depends on the depth of the friendship. In my case, most of the group were friends for 10+ years and done a ton of different things together before kids entered the scene, so the strength of the friendship was really activity agnostic at that point. I could see less long-lasting friendships or ones built more around specific activities having more of a challenge navigating the change.
It really depends on the people's values and lifestyle, the nature of your change and the degree to which your persona/life changes. If we bonded over vegan activism, and you decide to become a meat eater, it might not work. We bonded over art and now you decide to go live in the mountains as an ermit, might not work. We bonded over living off-grid and now you want to move to the city, might not work. We bonded over travelling and now you can't travel anymore and are stuck in a city with a kid, might not work.
People change over their lives. Your values are not the same as 9-year old you or 17-year old you. Life experiences and choices change you. Just because I was friends with 17-year old you who had a personality and set of values I aligned with, does not mean that I need to be friends with 40 year old you. 17-year eco activist turned homebody money-obsessed 40 year old man or 25 year old athlete turned into exercise-avoidant 50 year old man.
There is no soul or magical core to like here. The only thing that links you to your past selves is a memory of shared experiences
Yes, and that's when you find out whether the friendship was merely "built on" that experience, or is entirely composed of it.
I have lots of friendships that were formed in the kinds of experiences you describe - especially long distance cycling. Those people all have kids now, and we don't go cycle touring together. But I put the effort into finding other stuff to do with them, so we're still friends.
I became friends with you. If you change yourself by making a choice (whatever choice that might be), you shouldn't expect the other person to still stick with you.
- some friends are more selfish than you realized and that only becomes apparent when they put their preferences above short term needs you have
- some parents are exhausted and stop putting in the work needed to maintain friendships
- some friends don’t want to see their social circle become parent-filled, whether that’s because they’d feel left behind or because it doesn’t match their sense of self
- becoming a parent will lead to some sort of change in worldview or who you are, and that’s not always compatible with the friends you had
- as a parent you might just want to talk to people that ‘get it’
People grow apart sometimes and that’s part of life. Other times of course it’s about harder discussions and working through things.
This is it. Parenting drastically transforms you (your behaviour and values) for the next 18 years at the very least. In purely behavioural terms, you become someone else. Expecting people to hang out with a stranger (behaviourally speaking) of the basis of shared memories is odd. You share memories with your 19 year old self who would most likely be more interested in hanging around with others around his age than with you. No different for friends
I'm in the middle of this path of independence with my kids and it is bittersweet. (I too felt the weight when they were younger.)
Those small, common moments of love and intimacy you get when your kids are small fade away and become infrequent. Stuff like hugs, them wanting to hang around you, them doing things with you just to do things with you. Still amazing when they happen, though.
I can't remember who I was before becoming a parent and that has never really mattered to me. I know I spent (wasted) a lot of time gaming, nothing worth crying over, for me.
Kids have to eat your life, otherwise you may not be parenting quite as much as you should be (this means a LOT of different things to everyone).
My brother and sister in law had kids about the same time as us, so we grew together as parents as the kids grew up together.
Friends come and go and the good ones come back again. Most of my friends have kids 5-10 years younger than mine and that means we're at different life stages - I can offer them advice as to what to expect and also sort of enjoy (and lament at the same time) that I'm passed the stage they're going through.
I actually took up a sport again when my first was a couple of years old because I wanted to normalise the playing of sport. This, I think, kept me with an outlet and some socialising outside of work and family. The more strings to your bow the better (I've recently been thinking about a concept I've made up called "distributed happiness", this feels like an element of that; as long as one of those things is doing ok, then your can hang your hat somewhere at least).
One more thing I just remembered: your childhood was for you parents, your childrens' childhoods are for you. Take their wonder and naiveté as your own and see the world as they do, but with the life experience and consciousness to know how important and mind blowingly amazing it all is.
I really miss my children's childhood. My aches and pains tell me I'm too old to go through it again, but I still wonder...
P.S. play your kids In The Hall of the Mountain King. My kids danced around like nutters as it built up and crescendoed. I've got a video of my daughter saying, in a sad voice, "ohhhww", after it finished. I also have some other music I played them, classical and complex but also simple to "hear" and they really responded to it.
I was meant to get it back last week, but something extra needed doing. I haven't been all that proactive in following it up, and the reason is, whilst I really like the car, and I'm looking forward to getting it back and driving it (it's been garaged for six years), my happiness isn't dependent upon it; I've got a bunch of other things going on as well, such that I'm not sitting and biting my fingernails on the car being ready.
I play tennis, I roller skate and I'm learning some video editing to post outdoor trails with GPS overlays, I intentionally annoy my daughter and try to get conversations out of my son, I take my primarily indoor cats into the backyard for some rare outdoor time that they enjoy (and I enjoy them enjoying it), I have a job I enjoy with people I like working with, I try to find things my wife and I can do together (and I usually fail at that). My happiness is distributed amongst all these things. When one fails there are others to cling to. It means I don't dwell on the negatives (as much as I otherwise might).
There's always work to be done somewhere, so maybe it's distraction rather than happiness, but if it feels the same then what's the difference?
I look forward to wet weather because I can get computer stuff done without feeling guilty for not making the most of the nice weather. I look forward to nice weather because I can go for a skate or have a hit of tennis or play basketball with my daughter or just "be" outdoors (and slowly sip a warm drink).
I used to spend hours messing with code, gaming, interacting on forums, and keeping up with tech developments. Biking for miles! Sailing! Beaching! Exploring new music and always just learning. And actually sleeping in!
Now I feel like it is a huge struggle to do ANY of that... and I am still in mourning. STILL, almost 4 years later. My son also stopped sleeping through the night at 3 and he is almost 4 and it is STILL ONGOING. My partner and I have had to move into separate rooms in the house because I already have impacted sleep (CPAP) and I simply cannot function if he is waking me up every night. I already lost a job partly due to this :/
It didn't help that I had my first kid at 49, long after surprisingly firm habits were established that I feel like I am still "recovering from"
Someone gave me a piece of advice- "it goes easier if you just stop fighting it and accept it" and I'm still not 100% onboard with that LOL.
The only reason why I can even post here is because she took my son to his grandparents for the weekend, but she's coming back in 20 minutes and then we will be spending another "Family Day" at some event...
Don't worry, it's only for the rest of your life.
Get square with that as your number one priority. All the things you like doing, treat them as blessings every time you get to do them. Don't expect it, be surprised by it.
Everything else flows from there. Your kids are your most important job.
I'm looking forward to simply being able to play literally any kind of game with him where he will actually adhere to the rules and understands why the rules make it more fun. And construction toys that don't just make him frustrated because his detailed manual dexterity still needs some work.
> Reason No. 3: We only want to hang out like old times
I see this happen with many of my friends who have kids. They “want to stay connected to who they were before”, as you put it, and treat it like purely a scheduling problem that they don’t have enough time to do that.
As the friend, it’s very uncomfortable be witness to this. When I get invited over, they’ll arrange to put on a movie so the kids are occupied for a couple of hours and they can be their old selves, and their new family life is hidden away as if it’s some secret that I’m not invited to participate in.
I think it’s toxic to mix up long lasting with real.
I’ve had wonderful relationships with people that worked for a time in my life, and then it just didn’t make sense anymore (drifting interests, life phases, etc).
That is not to say that you shouldn’t put effort into your friendships, but sometimes trying to artificially keep something going can be just as bad as letting something go.
What on earth?
Every single expert referenced in this piece is insane.
We arrived at the brunch place 5 min late, thinking we'd done a pretty good job. One other friend arrived around the same time, but everyone else was an hour late. Because of the kids, we ended up not eating with them at all.
It's rude to your friends to be late when you don't have kids, but when you have small kids on a schedule, it's impossible to adjust.
Thanks for lecturing me on my friends and speaking style, neither of which you have the tiniest knowledge of.
This kind of know-it-all content-free post is something AI should be able to filter in future. I look forward to it.
Here's an everyday example. We can decide to randomly go somewhere for drinks and food on a weeknight. Parents need to do major coordination to make this work if they wanted to join (in most cases, you can forget it if there isn't a sitter).
Unless they want to bring the kid, which changes everything about our plans: the time we leave, the place we go to, how long we can stay at that place, etc.
This isn't bad, and sometimes we can accommodate, but if we just want to low-key get a drink and maybe some food at our local bar, this would likely become a weekend get-together. Given that we both usually have things going on during the weekend, it can be a few weeks or months before we're able to finally hang.
There's also a suite of stuff that parents deal with that us child-free folks don't. Picking a good school (and a house within that school district, usually out in the burbs, because school districts in most cities are underfunded and struggling to perform). Crushing daycare costs. Getting sick every month because of said daycare. Kids shows. Screens vs no screens. Tons of everyday things that every parent deals with that we have zero experience to. We can listen, sure, but it is easier to maintain experiences with people who "get it."
We do get to be the fun friends/family that spoils them when they grow up though. That's been a lot of fun!
Otherwise you’re just in different worlds with different priorities. Unless you have an affinity, like you golf together every few weeks for example, it becomes difficult.
If you're not actively going out of your way for your friends then you're not a good friend. Sorry. I know life is hard right now and blah blah blah and we can do that for a while. But when it becomes an all the time thing, then you're not a good friend.
And having a kid is an all the time thing. So if you let that become an excuse for why you're not going out of your way for your friends, then you're going to lose all your friends. So, don't let that become an excuse.
Everyone expects a very convenient relationship. I come over, dump my kid on you and I just have to worry about me and my kid. Or, the inverse - you come over, your kid is nowhere to be found and I don't have to worry about anything.
Relationships don't work that way. I hold my goddamn coworkers to a higher standard of care. Stick your neck out for your friends. Be uncomfortable. Be tired. At least, sometimes. And just understand that will be repaid.
1) Isn't this like the study to determine why toddlers fall down? Answer: they aren't good at walking yet and loose their balance, duh...
Obviously the time and effort of raising an infant, and beyond, cause some prior relationships to fall by the wayside. Do we really need "science" to 'splain that to us?
2) While I've never lost a relationship specifically because my friend's relationship produced a child, I have lost several because of marriage.
In my case, the friend's wife just wasn't happy with them being on such close terms with someone else. They were forced to choose: me or her. I don't blame the (ex)friend for choosing her, but I do still miss those people.
3) OK, there's a 3. My closest friendships have survived multiple marriages and children. On my end and theirs.
I feel that when you're really close to someone, the relationship will survive pretty much anything.
I would also conjecture that those friends who left the new mother "out of their plans", weren't really that friendly at all. Friendship is a two way street. If the other party isn't determined to stay connected, maybe the "friendship" wasn't as close as you thought?
I suspect in my scenario it was his lack of having kids and the ability to do so (they are not able to have kids). Best I can tell is it was painful for him to see / hear about my life with kids now.
Because our relationship had become long distance it mostly centered around long phone calls or gaming / vr sessions together ever month or so. I basically stopped trying to schedule these interactions because it became clear it was having such a negative impact on his emotions. I initially tried to avoid talking at all about kids and all that but it didn’t seem to help the situation.
Anyway that’s what I just went through and at this point I don’t know if we’ll ever connect again, it’s been 6 months since we exchanged emails, which used to be daily / multiple exchanges a week.
If the friend is willing to also graft on to the schedule of the baby like the parents are forced to for survival, then the friendship has a better chance of survival.
Non-parents usually have no clue how big a change this time management issue is.
The reality is that when the interests of friends change, the friendship itself might not survive. That's ok. People change. And with that, I feel that the chance of a friendship surviving such a life-changing event is tied to how encompassing their parent identity becomes.
If their former interests disappear (the ones on which we built our friendship), and every conversation inevitably becomes about their kids, then I will take a step back.
For example: The other day my wife mentioned to me that her sister (i.e. my sister-in-law) refers to their parents as 'grandma & granddad' when talking to her in private.
Now if you’re into playing musical instruments, hacking together a little project, or want to workout together or perhaps play a board game that’ll be much more plausible!
This was all true before parenthood, but much more enforced now. I think this is why parents often remain or develop friendships with friends and who end up having kids in the same activities.
Oh boy.
When I became a father I found that some people see nothing strange in being jealous over an infant.
Sadly some of my relationships suffered due to this, but interestingly fewer than with people who really, really, really need to drink whenever we meet. Kids and alcohol don't mix.
This example message is like something I'd send a recruiter, not a friend. Circle back? Six months?
WHO SAYS "CIRCLE BACK" TO A FRIEND? THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH THESE PEOPLE? Are we all HR now??
Imagine you text a friend "I had to put down my dog today" and they responded "let's circle back in the middle of next year"
That would definitely end our friendship, but not for the reasons NPR thinks.
Of course it is not genuine, nothing about corporate America is genuine. It’s all bullshit.
If you saw some of my writing before LLMs existed - it’s out there on an AWS official blog somewhere - you would swear it was created by ChatGPT, it reads like all of the other generic salesy crap that was the house writing style at AWS.
Hopefully what I’m about to say next doesn’t come across as me pulling out the “race card”. I’ve hardly ever been rejected from any job I’ve applied to in 25 years as a developer and the last 5 working full time at consulting departments/companies - first working at AWS (Professional Services) and then at third party companies. So I am not claiming racism is endemic in the industry from my personal experience.
But I am one of very few customer facing, highly technical senior Black consultants I’ve come across - even at AWS I think I worked with one other person and even they were more IT focused (security, networking) than software development. I am now the only Black staff consultant out of 70 in my company. I’m not saying it’s racism - it just is what it is.
I am saying that when I am interviewing for consulting jobs, speaking to executives, writing proposals and assessments where real money is on the line, I speak corporate as well as anyone else. I don’t get the default assumed competence as a short black guy that a tall white guy gets.
When the rest of the people talk about the concerts they went to or what they do for fun as small talk, it’s also not like I’m going to talk about seeing WuTang Clan and Ice Cube in concert.
I am going to talk about how much fun my wife and I had in Costa Rica and our other vacations we take during the year.
When I talk to the technical side of the company, I turn off my corporate speak and talk to technical.
If anything, I try to use Simple English where I can.
Afterward, she jumped into justifications. She asked if I was deaf in one ear and maybe her daughter had said something I didn’t hear? I didn't hear anything. She claimed the kick happened only because I didn’t answer. The only thing she said to her daughter, who ran off immediately, was that she’d have to “work on rebuilding trust.”
This wasn’t isolated. The girl regularly told anyone who’d listen that she wished I wasn’t around. She constantly hurled rude comments my way. She had a filthy mouth too casually describing adult scenes in front of other adults like it was normal. She was in third grade. Her mother and grandmother called her a “love bug.” She was anything but.
That was a good enough reason to end the relationship.