Adult friendships: maintaining old ones, making new ones

Maintaining old friendships

Even though you might feel your life has changed dramatically since having a baby, your friends are still part of who you are. They offer shared experiences and understanding. They can help maintain balance in your life, providing encouragement and sometimes a much needed reality check.

• Try planning ahead. It’s easier to make time if you plan to do something rather than hoping it will happen spontaneously. Set a date to catch up with friends and stick to it. But don’t be worried if you have to change your plans - having a new baby can make things unpredictable!
• Friends are interested in your life, no matter what’s going on, so you can encourage them to join in your new life as a parent. If your friends do have kids, they’re likely to be understanding and supportive. Even if your friends don’t have children, they might enjoy hearing what it’s like to be a parent – delighting in the positives and sympathising with the negatives. They might even have a fresh take on things that could help you.
• Friends who don’t have children can still have fun on outings with your kids. It’s a matter of picking the right activity, whether it’s feeding ducks at the park, going to a matinee movie screening or heading to the pool. Why not take the pram for a good walk and talk with a friend?
• Gatherings that are easy to organise can take the stress out of getting together. For example, a pot-luck dinner is a great way to have people over without having to worry about cooking and organising. Another advantage is that your baby can go to bed without having his routine disrupted.
• A regular babysitter and ‘date night’ can give you the chance to go out on the town, see a movie or go out for a catch-up dinner. Or organise babysitting ‘swaps’ with friends who have children.
• You might feel like your only identity is as a parent, but to your old friends – especially those without children – you’re just you. So try to talk about things other than your baby, even though you’ve probably done nothing but care for her every waking minute since she was born. If all else fails, ask a lot of questions and do a lot of listening.

Meeting new friends

Now that you have a child, another group of friends will open up for you – other parents. Here are some good ways to meet parents:

• Join a new parents group at your neighbourhood clinic or community centre.
• Chat at your local playgroup, kindergarten or play centre.
• Perhaps stay in touch with new parents you meet at the hospital.
• Go to the park so you can chat while your children play together.
• Go to ‘parents and babies’ sessions at your local cinema.
• Join an online forum where you can chat with other parents.

Dads

Sometimes new fathers find it difficult to maintain old friendships and build new ones. The friends they had when they were single or childless tend to drop away as fathers’ social lives become more about family and children.

Stay-at-home dads can be more isolated than mothers because they’re generally less likely to join new parent groups – often because they feel out of place. But playgroups – even traditional mothers groups – can be good places for dads to meet other dads.

Fathers say that talking to their friends about their child and their new parenting experiences is one of the few personal things they feel comfortable about sharing. Talking about kids and experiences of being a dad can be a way to help cement new friendships or maintain old ones.

What other parents say

• ‘My son was the first born in one of my circle of friends, and their reaction was great. Then later the visits decreased because their lives continued in their own direction and I had taken a new path.’
• ‘We decided to be proactive about (seeing our friends). We would have everyone over at our house a lot. Friday night was pizza and footy night, we would have BBQs in the nice weather on the weekends. It was great everyone coming to us, and that way, James could sleep in his bed and we got to catch up with all of our friends.’
• ‘A lot of my friendships have fallen to the wayside. I’m in such a different headspace now that I’m a mother and my priorities have changed so much. I’ve just let the friendships go and will wait and see what happens in the meantime. I’ve just made some really lovely friends with some of my playgroup mothers which is great and I don’t feel so alone in my motherhood now.’
• ‘We were the first among our friends to have a baby. They all thought it was great at first, a novelty I guess. Always dropping in to see us ... Then they started organising dinners at restaurants and doing things that just weren’t baby friendly. So we stopped seeing them so much.’

Video: playgroups

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This short video features parent stories about playgroups, child care and preschool. These settings can be great for children – but also a good chance for you to meet other parents and make new friends and contacts.

Mums and dads talk about strategies they used to settle their children into play and care outside the home. They also share their feelings about their children going to care and preschool.

 

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