Why some friendships end after kids come into the picture

If you don't mind me sharing my story, here's my take on this discussion. A few decades ago, my wife (then girlfriend) and I were raising a child at the age of 18. That experience shaped my understanding of friendship more than anything else.

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.

I think your attitude is great. When people have kids later in life, with all the anxieties of “doing it right,” they often think they have to stop going to parties. It is genuinely hard to prioritize your own fun when kids are in the picture. It takes work and coordination to keep partying. Parties are not extraneous — they are a really important part of our lives. Now I need to go get the bbq fired up…

Observationally it's the truth. However the truth can hurt. It doesn't help with the implicit issues of few or no relationships of that quality.

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.

isn't 'real friendship' a case of no true scotsman? you see friendship as a together no matter what link.

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).

You make a great point, and I completely agree that deep friendships require mutual investment, and life doesn’t always make that easy. I feel fortunate to have held on to a few close friends, but I’ve also lost many connections that couldn’t survive the shifting priorities over time.

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.

lol...thanks for the comment. Keeping fun and connection alive during those early parenting years wasn’t easy, but we figured out how to integrate it instead of cutting it out. A basement hangout with a toddler in a diaper and a crew of Bon Jovi–style teens wasn’t your typical "party", but somehow, it worked.

And yes, agree that BBQs are great opportunities when shared. Parenthood doesn’t have to mean social exile.

Fair point, and yes, I agree that friendships are mutual, and no one is obligated to adjust to someone else’s life changes. I certainly didn’t expect that from my friends. I didn’t mean to label those who drifted as “bad friends,” especially knowing that I also could’ve done more to invest in those connections that were fading.

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.

A relevant question is: how much effort did you put into retaining the relationships with friends that ended up 'drifting away'?

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'm really enjoying this discussion, and you’re right, my choice of the word “true” wasn’t ideal. Thanks for pointing that out. What I meant was more along the lines of “making the effort to stay connected”, the kind of friendships where both parties are there through the good and the bad. That kind of connection can form early or later in life, but once it exists, I believe it’s something to be cherished.

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.

This is exactly it. Friendships shouldn't die because kids come into the picture.