This is part of Advice Week: Friendship Edition. We’ll help you make friends, leave them—and even sleep with them.
If the question of how to make and keep friends as an adult is a perennial subject in the letters submitted to our advice columns, then its narrower cousin, how to make parent friends, follows closely behind. Over the years, letter writers have been haunted by the delicate dynamics seemingly required to befriend the parents at their children’s school or sporting events. We’ve heard from moms and dads struggling to fit in; child-free friends feeling pushed aside for their friend’s kids; and parent friends butting heads over the one thing that united them in the first place.
We convened a group of Slate parents to discuss the role these friendships have had in their own lives, and asked them to give you their own advice for making friends and keeping them. You’ll hear from Jenée Desmond-Harris, Hillary Frey, Derreck Johnson, Dan Kois, and Rebecca Onion.
Paola de Varona: How important have parent friends been to you?
Dan Kois: Right now, I am at a house in Virginia Beach with a bunch of parent friends and their kids. These are mostly a group of college friends who we’ve had since long before any of us were parents. And I was talking to one of them last night about how I definitely felt like I really knew everyone from our hours and hours of hanging out in college, but watching them parent over the last 16 to 19 years has really been transformative in my understanding of them as people and of how valuable our friendship is. It’s given me sort of a fresh appreciation for this particular kind of parent friend among all the other ones, the kind where they’ve accompanied you and you’ve accompanied them through the whole journey and you’ve had a chance to see them change and to see their personalities and moral codes revealed and tested in all the different ways that parenting often does.
Jenée Desmond-Harris: I’m not nearly as far along in this process as Dan is. I’m not even two and a half years in. But so far, some of my most valuable parent friends have been people who were already my good friends and who I talked to a lot regardless of whether they had children. They happen to have had children before me and know more than me and can just offer support, check-ins, feedback, humor, and all of that.
I used to have pretty strong opinions against the idea of mom friends, meaning friends who you choose because the main experience that bonds you is parenthood. I just thought that doesn’t make any more sense than having a Person With a Job friend or a Person Who Eats Dinner friend. This is an experience many people have and I just don’t feel like it gives you much in common with someone else, especially because parenting and motherhood in particular is an arena where I feel differences are really highlighted and there’s a lot of sensitivity and judgment.
All you have to do is look at Instagram comments to see that people have just extremely different views on the right way to be a parent, the right way to treat children, and the right way to organize your life. Feelings can get really hurt around that stuff. So as someone who’s really sensitive to criticism and also someone who’s really sensitive to hurting other people’s feelings, I had no desire to just meet a random mom at the park and say, “Let’s be friends since we’re both moms,” because as far as I know, our approach to motherhood could be something that divides us just as easily as it could be something that unites us. That said, I do think that if you can find a parent friend who has similar values to you, thinks about parenting in the same way, has a similar temperament, and is not judgmental, it’s really priceless. So now I’m at the point where I do understand the value, I just think that a very small percentage of people will fill that role in a meaningful and rewarding way.
Hillary Frey: I was just thinking about how two of my oldest friends in New York are five years older than I am and they had kids within months of each other. For a long time, I felt really left out by this. Their oldest kids are six years older than my daughter, so one’s in college and one’s going to college this year and my daughter’s going into seventh grade. I was a very go-it-on-your-own person with a baby and a little kid. I never read a parenting book. I really followed my gut. And I’d been a baby nanny, so I wasn’t a stressed-out parent of a young person. Now flash-forward, this is not the case with a middle schooler. And actually, I find that with my two oldest friends, it’s invaluable to have a space where I can talk this through with them. It’s one of the only group chats I have. We don’t parent the same way. We all have really intricate, complicated relationships with our kids that develop as they get older and become more complex people.
I’m not going to say there’s no judgment, we all have judgment and feelings, but because we know each other so well, I think we’re able to calibrate how we give support to each other that’s based on who we are as people, not just as parents. Another old friend from my first years in New York, so this is going on for about 27 years, my dear friend Miranda, our daughters were born just months apart. You could not put two more different people together than the two of us. We parent so differently and our daughters are really different. They love each other.
I think if there’s a shared respect and an appreciation for the difference, you don’t have to have the same philosophy. But you’ve got to respect each other and be OK with things being different. And in fact, my daughter spent a week with their family in Washington in June. It was a really different experience for her. I called it Camp Miranda. Miranda had them polishing silver for hours. These girls were busy and they were working. I asked my daughter the other day, “Are you going to go back to Camp Miranda next summer?” And she was like, “Oh yeah, now I have a better idea of what to expect, too.” So it doesn’t always have to be about comportment, but there has to be an understanding and respect for how people do things differently. Even leaning on each other for advice with a very different perspective has been really helpful for me with my friend.
One final aside: I am anti becoming too close to your kid’s friend’s parents because it will break your heart when those kids don’t get along anymore. I have gone through this and I just don’t do it anymore.
Jenée: The tough thing I’ve encountered with parenting differences is that people think their way of parenting is just the truth. I don’t think people are often aware that they’ve made a choice and selected a path. So there doesn’t seem to be as much sensitivity or self-editing around the thinking that, well, maybe I shouldn’t share this because we do this differently. People just might say, “You have to make your kid eat everything on their plate at dinner because otherwise, they’ll turn into a horrible, demanding person.” And that is actually just the truth to them. It’s not one parenting path, it’s just the truth.
Dan: Isn’t that the truth? My understanding is that’s correct.
Hillary: I do think things change as the kids get older because people realize you only have so much control over who your kid becomes. They are their own person. And you see that as a parent. They’re influenced by you, but they are themselves. For example, I am a voracious eater. My daughter has not been, but she’s changing. All of a sudden she loves shrimp, and she’s trying new foods all the time. They change. So you might have a million regrets about something you do with your kid that your friend’s kid doesn’t do, right? Your friend’s kid does XYZ. You’re like, I wish my kid did that. They might do it one day, you don’t know. Or they’re going to do something else that’s awesome that your friend’s kid doesn’t do, but you don’t get to see that, I think to your point, Jenée, until a lot later. With the little kids, there is so much judgment because it’s wrapped up in anxiety, I think, too.
Jenée: Absolutely. I think I’m just coming out of the stage where everyone’s extremely anxious and flustered and no one has been fully humbled yet. So I can definitely see how that changes by ages 12 or 13.
Rebecca Onion: I wanted to say something about whether or not you should make friends with your kid’s friend’s parents as Hillary was talking about. So I think I have a slightly different perspective because I live in a smaller place. I live in a town that has only 10,000 people. I moved here about three years before I had a kid. Then I had a kid and when she was 3, the pandemic happened and now she’s 7.
So parenting has basically been my social life, but I think the way that it’s evolved here has shown me that there are so many different levels of making friends with the parents of the kids that your kid likes. So first of all, I have a really good group of people who have kids about J.’s age. We all got together during the pandemic because we wanted to go out in the woods together. And so I guess you could call that a mutual belief in the importance of being outside.
But then we’ve become a real friend group. J. doesn’t always love hanging out with those kids. Especially when she was younger, she felt left out because they knew each other better and a lot of the kids in the group had a sibling in the group. So she was socially miserable in this group. But I would be like, well, this is my social world and I really like these adults and I think these kids are fine so you’re coming. You don’t get a choice.
Now she’s older and more socially able and has found different ways to be friends with kids in this group. There’s probably 15 kids altogether that come. So there’s that level of people. And honestly, parenting allowed me to make friends in this town where I didn’t really know anyone in a way that I never would’ve been able to if I didn’t have a kid. Then there are also just many acquaintances. I see the same people at every birthday party. If I go to a playground and I see one particular kid is there, I think, oh boy, here we go. I’m going to be chatting with that parent. So I get my little arsenal of chitchat ready to do it.
It’s helped me on an acquaintance level to just know more about what’s going on around town and what’s happening in the community. You end up doing more social chitchat than maybe you wanted to necessarily—and it does wear on me sometimes. But I do learn a lot about what’s going on in the school and the summer camps and what different policy things are going on that are going to affect the kids’ lives. I’m not sure that I would’ve had the chance to build that kind of network without a kid.
And I try never to talk about food, sugar, iPads, or anything like that with them. We try to leave those topics to the side.
Jenée: See, that’s what I don’t want to do. If I can’t say my real feelings about everything, I feel it’s draining to be around you.
Dan: I spend so much time biting my tongue and that has definitely been learned behavior around parent friends. It seems crucial, honestly, to make a lot of those friendships work.
Jenée: This is why I have only one local, new mom friend. I met her because my husband was friends with her husband and they wanted to meet up at a park. And I was like, Why do I have to be part of this? Go with the dads and the kids. I don’t know this woman. We don’t need to have everyone there, but fine, I’ll go. But the minute we started talking, she mentioned something about her kid and it was just clear that we had similar personalities and views about parenting. It felt so good to talk to someone who just got me and got how I felt about everything. So that has been really rewarding for me.
Dan: In contrast with your experience, Rebecca, we have someone on this call who just moved from one really big city to another really big city with small kids. And I’d be interested in hearing, Derreck, what your experience was like finding friends in a gigantic new city where you maybe did not have that many social connections to start.
Derreck Johnson: It’s still a daily challenge. So all of my friends still live in New York and the majority of them don’t have kids. And actually, a few of them know for a fact that they’ll never have kids, and that’s cool. We’re in a group text, and talk about a bunch of different kinds of things. So moving over here was interesting. Both of my kids go to a private school and it goes from pre-K all the way to eighth. Because the school is so small, it’s very community-driven, so all the parents know each other and the kids build a bond.
But there’s a bunch of roadblocks for me in general. No. 1, I’m one out of maybe two or three other Black dads in the entire school. It’s funny, my wife has had a very easy time making friends with other moms. As a mom group, they talk about the kids, homework, birthday parties. But I also think she has more of a closeness to them because they all grew up kind of the same culturally because they’re all from Los Angeles. My wife’s entire family lives near us, which is the main reason why we moved here from New York.
I didn’t really think about how hard it would be to make parent friends until I got here. I don’t like forcing relationships. The dads are cool, they’re nice to hang out with in spurts and talk about school or basketball at events. But it is very hard for me to say, “Let’s all hang out and just kick it,” because I size people up really fast and can tell if we’re going to click. Maybe I’m being too harsh, but also, I’m getting older too, so I like to preserve my energy.
Recently, we had a huge breakthrough, though. In September, my wife and I are celebrating 10 years of marriage. So we were all at an event and my wife ended up inviting all these parents to a trip to wine country over here. Now it’s going to be us and four other couples from the same school in an Airbnb drinking wine for an entire weekend. This is either going to be a really, really big deal and will help us become stronger or it’s going to suck.
Rebecca: You didn’t want to start with going to a bar for a night or something?
Derreck: No, no, we’ve been to many bars.
Dan: You gotta go. You have to jump in the pool. Just go directly into the deep end, this is going to be great. By the end of the weekend, you’re going to have at least one person who you totally love and one person who you’re never speaking to again. But it’ll clarify these friendships beautifully.
Jenée: And there’s going to be a whole different group chat with a subset of you: the people who hate the person who did something wrong.
I have a question for Dan and Derreck. Do you feel that maybe it’s tougher to make dad friends than mom friends? Because in our culture, many people don’t think of dad as being as central a part of your identity as mom.
Dan: I don’t know that it’s tougher, but I do know that dads, stereotypically—and in my experience truly—often tend to depend on their spouses to handle the friendships. They leave the friendship maintenance to wives particularly. So I find that frustrating and difficult. When I have trouble finding dad friends, it’s often because the dads don’t view friend-making as part of their personal portfolio.
Rebecca: I also feel like you dads can speak to this, but at least in my town, it feels like when the women go on maternity leave, that’s when people meet up to do La Leche League or have baby playgroup or other baby activities. And for men there’s just not as much of a structure for meeting up.
Jenée: Hillary, you were talking about what happens when your kid has a falling-out with someone else’s kid. I want to hear more about that. Were you saying you just avoid closeness because of that?
Hillary: I’m a really extra person when it comes to hosting and initiating social things. So I was always inviting people over and hosting. I really like what Derreck said about wanting to conserve your energy for things that you know are going to serve you. I think maybe I’m not great at that. I will give my energy to anybody who’s asking for it. I don’t know if it’s good or bad, but it’s just what it is.
And I can bite my tongue. I try really hard to see things from other perspectives. So unless somebody is really coming at me just because we don’t agree on something, I kind of bend over backward to try to see it from their perspective. I’m much more self-critical about myself or my own parenting. So kind of what would happen, Jenée, over these years of elementary school and through COVID, is I would give a lot. But over time, as the kids diverge or fight or change their feelings toward each other, it got more complicated with the parents. I thought we were friends, but then I realized: These relationships aren’t independent of our kids, and the kids are growing and changing. I would have invested less in some of these relationships if I had understood how contingent they would be. I’m going to think a lot about what Derreck said about where you put your energy and your resources And I love also, Rebecca, what you were describing as building a community of parents around some core shared interests. That is not what I was able to do.
Jenée: You know how in romantic relationships, people have the defining the relationship talk? It almost feels like you could have that with your parent friends, where at some point you sit down and say, So do you want to be more than parent friends? To what extent would still be in each other’s lives, even if the kids grew apart? Can this be about us now? Do we have an actual commitment to each other beyond our children? And what will that look like?
Rebecca: I’m just extremely afraid of teenagerhood. These stories are making me more so.
Dan: That’s why Hillary isn’t wrong, that it really can be useful and fruitful to consciously separate your parent friends from your kids’ friend groups. It’s been very useful to us that our best parent friends at this point, for the most part, their kids aren’t friends with our kids anymore. Maybe in some cases they never were, but they’re more neighborhood friends with whom we can share the dramas of parenting and talk through our problems. But there’s very rarely any conflict between the kids to cause issues with that.
I want to go back to something that Derreck said about not being a person to push relationships even when you’re on the hunt for new friends. Once upon a time, I also wasn’t a person to push relationships, but my desperation for parent friends when we moved to Virginia became such that I turned into that person. And my wife and I joke a lot about how we are always the ones who were inviting people over, inviting people out for a drink or setting up some get-together, and 7 percent of those pan out into actual friendships, which means that for the last 14 years, we’ve been dealing with a lot of middle-school-style “Why aren’t they calling us back?” heartache. “We thought they had a good time, why didn’t they invite us over?”
That sucks and we hate it. And yet it’s the reason that we have the friends that we have. Like, in the style of the classic pickup artist, you have to talk to 100 women at a bar and you just need one of them to say yes. You have to talk to 100 parents at your freaking school, and you just need one of them to be cool, but you still have to talk to the other 99.
I think a lot about advice that Elizabeth Newcamp gives, our beloved Elizabeth from Care and Feeding, the podcast, who is a military wife. So every three years or so, she and her whole family move to an entirely different continent and her whole life is basically making new friends in every new place. She basically has a rule, which is that you say yes to every single thing and you invite everyone you meet to something and that’s just the way it is. That’s what you have to do to make friends. And even though it is a hassle and even though you’re setting yourself up for some glum evenings or times where you didn’t get along with someone, that is the process. So I just want to hear Derreck’s horrified response to me telling him he has to invite 100 people over for a drink.
Hillary: He’s doing that. Not only that, but they’re going on a trip together.
Derreck: Yeah, I could have easily said, “No, I don’t want to do this,” but instead I said, “I’m going to do it. It’s out of my comfort zone, but I’m going to do it.” Going on a major milestone trip with a bunch of people that I’ve never hung out with outside of going to a bar or a school event is a big deal to me. The one dad that I actually vibe with the most can’t make it to the trip, so I was bummed about that. But that one friendship was the most natural one that I developed. We kind of click on music stuff. That’s the most natural way I’ve built a friendship with any of the dads so far. It just takes time. I’ve had enough conversations with other dads and other parents in general where you just kind of know who is the most like you from a vibe level. You don’t have to have the same experiences or look the same or anything, but just have that one thing makes me feel like I can hang out with this person more.
Paola: Any last thoughts, everyone?
Hillary: I was also thinking about this story because lots of you have younger kids too. My friend, Miranda, who I talked about, we kind of fell out of touch for a while. Then she called me at some point, and said, “We’re going to be in New York and would love to see you.” Of course, I’m immediately like, “You have to come over to my place, I’m going to cook for you,” etc. And we sat at dinner, the girls didn’t talk. My daughter was like, Why are you exposing me to these people? Who is this? And finally I was like, “Why don’t you girls just go to your room and play a game,” right?
Hours go by. At 11:30 p.m., we’re like, what are they doing? We walk in the room, and they were 9 at the time, and they’re sitting on my daughter’s bed facing each other. So we ask them, “What are you doing?” And Miranda’s daughter looked up and said, “I’m telling her all of my secrets.” And they have been like this ever since. So something I was thinking about as you all were talking was: Sometimes things don’t take on the first try. Not with adults, not with kids. It’s worth not giving up the first time—both with the kids and the adults. You connect at different times with different people. And ultimately, I will not stop hosting people and you’re all invited to my house with or without your children.
Derreck: Another thing, too, don’t count out your friends who don’t have kids who are still more than willing to hang out with you no matter what. A friend of mine told me she loves coming over here to hang out because she knows that her friends that are parents always have the best snacks and the best alcohol. It’s nice to have that connection to another side of stuff you don’t get to see anymore. I don’t get to go out and be social like I used to, but having friends that do, it’s a nice balance.
Jenée: And once you get to a certain age, even your friends without kids are just as washed as you are and no one’s expecting you to go out all the time.
Rebecca: If they’re perfectly fine with coming over and watching TV.
Jenée: Exactly.
Dan: It’s incredibly important. There is this real tendency on the part of some parents to immediately upon having children be like, Well, anyone without children is no longer worth my time. But you don’t need to J.D. Vance all your friends. You can just still recognize that there is an entire interesting population of people out there who have a lot to add to your life and who can still be important to you even if they don’t worry constantly about public school, or whatever.
Rebecca: One last question: Is there anything that a prospective parent-friend could do to their kid or in relationship to their kid that makes you not like them? For me, I think if the person just complains about their kid constantly and shames them in front of me, I just feel like it’s not going to happen between us.
Jenée: I can’t think of anything other than just being mean to your kid. The complaining, I leave a little more room for it just because I think that is how a lot of people bond. I think it feels like the safe way to bond because it’s not bragging and it’s not judging. And I definitely notice that I even find myself sounding as if I have tons of complaints about my child when really I don’t.
Rebecca: Don’t you get tired of hearing it?
Dan: Never. People who have listened to the podcast for a long time will not be surprised to hear me say that the No. 1 thing that is going to make me think that probably we’re not going to be able to develop a really deep friendship when I meet another parent is if they have an enormous dedication to their children’s travel sports. Not because I necessarily think that’s bad, though I do, but because I know that they will never have time to hang out. And whenever we’re like, “Oh, do you guys want to go somewhere for the weekend?” They’ll be like, “We can’t, we have to go to Savannah for a three-day baseball tournament.”
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