Making New Friends and Trying to Keep the Old — Navigating Friendships as New Parent

When my husband and I revealed the news that I was pregnant, our friends were shocked.

At the time, we were the leaders — and founders — of a Meetup group for couples without kids. We’d created the group to make friends after moving from Pittsburgh to Los Angeles, which meant none of our friends had kids — and many didn’t want them at all.

I was nervous to break the news to those who had chosen a child-free lifestyle, because I knew how it felt to feel like someone else’s kid was thrust upon you. Several of our friends in our old city had kids pretty young, which meant any time spent together was suddenly centered around the baby.

Admittedly, I didn’t love this, because I wasn’t ready for it. They chose to have a baby, so why does my life have to change?

Thankfully, most of our friends embraced our happy news. Despite their surprise, they were happy for us and eager to support us in our next chapter.

Those who were planning to have kids in the future wanted to learn all about the pregnancy process and those who weren’t were still kind and accepting of this huge thing happening in our lives.

Before our son was born, we had a very active social life. Our weekends were packed with brunches, happy hours, movie nights, and dinners with friends. This continued throughout my pregnancy. In fact, we were even out to dinner with a group of close friends the night before my water broke.

This drastically changed as soon as our son was born.

New babies have to spend most of their young lives at home, and at the time, we lived in a tiny little bungalow that we barely fit into. This made it hard to have many friends over — not that we had the energy to do much socializing anyway.

The busy social life my husband and I once had immediately became a thing of the past.

People kept telling us we needed to make friends with kids, but we fought it. We loved our pre-baby life, and just assumed we’d find a way to work our son back into it.

The thing we didn’t fully comprehend at the time is that kids change every aspect of your life — even the parts they’re not directly involved in.

After a few months, our son was fully vaccinated and we moved to a bigger house, making it easier to be a bit more social. Spending more time with our friends was great, but things had definitely changed.

Unless my parents were in town to watch the baby, we brought him with us, which meant earlier outings and stroller-friendly restaurants.

Even when we were able to leave our son at home with my parents, we still weren’t too eager to stay out late or drink too much, due to the early morning responsibilities that come with having a baby. Some friends understood this better than others, which was totally fair, as this was our lifestyle change, not theirs.

This shift in our new parent definition of fun gradually made us wonder what it would be like to have at least a few friends in our same stage of life. As much as we’d previously fought the idea of making parent friends, it was becoming more and more appealing.

This feeling grew when I started taking our son to a weekly storytime for babies at a local library. Until then, I hadn’t had much exposure to other new parents, which made these weekly outings just as fun for me as our son.

Even having a few minutes to engage in small talk with other parents in the same boat felt really nice.

Trading stories about things like teething and the joy of having a few moments to yourself made me feel like I’d found our new tribe and it was time to embrace it. I’d come home and tell my husband about it, and he was just as excited as I was.

We still love our friends without kids dearly and want to spend as much time with them as possible, but we’re ready to expand the circle to include new moms and dads we can join in navigating new parenthood.