Are your friends with your kids’ friends parents?

[Anonymous]

Yes, but (1) we have twins so it's easier because they're in the same grade and they're our only children so it's just one set of parents and (2) we lucked into a really great class of parents at our kids' school.

[Anonymous]

Yes, quite a few of my best friends are moms of my kids’ closest friends. Same for dh and the dads. But we also live close to one another, with one couple being our next door neighbors. And our neighborhood is super social. But I also have close friends whose kids are the same age/grade as mine and the kids are not friends.

I have noticed that as my oldest has gone to middle school, he is becoming close with kids whose parents I don’t know as they went to different elementary schools and don’t live in our neighborhood. So I can see how this dynamic will change.

[Anonymous]

I have 3 kids with a large age gap. We are friendly with my kids’ friends’ parents but they are not our adult friends. My oldest is 14 and youngest is in kindergarten.

I have made a few adult friends through my kids’ schools but their kids are not my kids’ close friends. When kids were younger (under age 6), we would get together, more for adult company. Once kids are 6-7, they have their own friend preferences. We don’t have one set of friends where adults and kids’ friendships line up. We had two families we hung out with with all the time when kids were in preschool but both those couples ended up divorcing. One moved away and one is local. Dh still hangs out with the dad. The mom seems to want nothing to do with us or anyone.

[Anonymous]

Our school (Catholic) really pushes this by having all kinds of parent-only events including happy hours...they want the families to be BFFs. I'm friendly with everyone but not intimate and I make sure to attend everything because the families who don't get pegged as unfriendly.
The only really good mom friends I have made have kids who no longer click with mine (preschool friends).

[Anonymous]

Yes, when my kids were that age I became pretty close with some of the parents of my kids' friends.

My kids are 23 and 18 now. For my oldest, there are about 5-7 of us that still get together every few months to catch up and socialize. With my youngest, there are just a few of us that still see each other occasionally, maybe once or twice a year. We're all friends on facebook and so still communicate in that way too.

[Anonymous]

^^ I mean to say elementary school. These are people I became close to when my kids were that age.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:No and even if you think you're friends now, it won't last unless you're neighbors or something else that contributes to the friendship.

I’ve seen even neighborhood friendships end badly.

[Anonymous]

My 7 and 8 year olds have good friends in different “spheres”: swim friends, church friends, playground friends and school friends. We are only close with a few of the families that we spend a lot of time with. One of the kids has been friends with my kid for years and so I feel a kind of affection for this kid and his mom just by shared history I guess.

[Anonymous]

Yes, we’ve become good friends with other families largely through team sports. Most of our weekends are spent at some sort of ball field, so that is where we initially spent time with and got to know other parents. We have 2 sporty boys so a lot of their good friends have come from their teams.

This branched out into inviting families over for bbqs and eventually to couples’ hang outs, vacations together, etc. I think it helps living somewhere almost all the kids attend the neighborhood school together, so our kids have a lot of friends in our neighborhood or walk/bikeable from our house. I went to private school growing up so everyone was scattered in different parts of town, which made after school or casual/impromptu get togethers harder. Whereas now it’s easy to see our friends and arrange play dates for the kids with little scheduling since we’re all close by. The family we’ve become closest with lives 3 doors down (we were in a COVID bubble together and have kids the same ages), so it’s super convenient.

[Anonymous]

At that age we tried but it doesn’t last as the kids get older since they make their own friends and we don’t often meet the parents.
When my kids were your kids’ ages one of our DCs had issues with a friend and the mom took it so badly she cut off all contact between our two families, including the two DCs who had nothing to do with it. So I gave up after that. Looking back it was a huge blessing.

[Anonymous]

I feel like more of the parents were friends when I was growing up too. I wonder if it’s bc a lot of the moms didn’t work, and people got married younger, so people didn’t have as many friends or as much life lived before having kids. Where I grew up, many of the moms stayed home and did tons of volunteer work at the schools, churches, temples, etc. So people also spent a lot of time together through these other activities.

No clue if this is relevant to the adult friendship issue, but I have wondered about it.