Why Is It Harder to Make Mom Friends As An Adult? Practical Parenting Tips for Connection
Last Tuesday I stood hunched against my minivan door, watching my 4-year-old dig a chunk of limestone out of the preschool mulch instead of lining up with his class. A granola bar crumb was stuck to the thigh of my gray sweatpants, and the mom who stands next to me every morning was scrolling her work email while her son twisted the strap of her backpack. I’ve been at this preschool for six months, I realized, and I still don’t know her last name.
I grew up watching my mom have a solid group of mom friends. They carpooled to soccer practice, brought each other casseroles when someone had a new baby, and spent Saturday afternoons drinking iced tea on our porch while we kids ran through the sprinkler. It looked easy, like friendships just popped up out of the routine of being a mom. When I moved to a new city three years ago for my husband’s job, I assumed I’d build the same thing quickly. That hasn’t happened.
I tried the big local Facebook mom group first, 18 months ago. The first meetup I went to was at a boutique play cafe that charged $22 just for my kid to get in the door. Everyone sat around a big table talking about their toddler sleep schedules and zero-waste home routines, and 15 minutes in, my kid dumped a full bucket of water out of the sensory table onto another mom’s custom knitted rug. I apologized so hard I was shaking, paid the entry fee, and left before anyone asked my name. I haven’t gone back to another group meetup since.
Last month I got invited to a birthday party for a kid in my son’s class. I showed up with a $15 set of dinosaur figurines, stood by the veggie platter for 20 minutes, and realized the only person I knew there had bailed with a cold. I made small talk with two other moms about how the weather had turned, checked my work calendar, and left 15 minutes early to take a work call. No one asked me to get coffee after.
So is it actually harder to make mom friends as an adult than it used to be? I think the answer is yes, for reasons that don’t get talked about much. Most of us move away from our hometowns for work now, so we don’t have the built-in network of high school friends who all had kids around the same time. Schedules are all over the place too—some of us work full time in offices, some work remote part time, some stay home, so it’s rare that a whole group of people has the same three hours free on a Wednesday. And we all go into it expecting to find “our people”—the group that agrees with every parenting choice we make, that has the same hobbies and same values—so we hold back when someone doesn’t check every box.
A few months ago I stopped chasing the big group of perfect mom friends and started trying small things, and that’s when things started to shift. The first thing I did was stop asking for big commitments up front. Instead of working up the nerve to invite someone I just met to a two-hour brunch, I ask for one tiny, low-stakes interaction. The week before last, that same mom I stand next to at drop off mentioned her 4-year-old refuses to eat any vegetable except corn. I didn’t blurt out a brunch invite. I just said, “Oh my god, same—my son only eats broccoli if it’s cut into tiny fries and fried. Let me get your number, I’ll text you the recipe.” That’s it. She texted me back a day later saying her son loved it, and now we text once or twice a week about dumb kid stuff.
The second thing I did was lower the bar for what counts as a mom friend. I used to think I needed someone who agreed with me about screen time limits and school policies and what kind of snacks to serve at birthday parties. The person I meet at the park every Wednesday lets her kid have a soda every Saturday, and I’m pretty strict about sugar with my kid. But we both hate folding laundry, we both drink too much cold brew, and we can sit on a park bench and complain about how expensive preschool is for 45 minutes without running out of things to say. That’s enough, right? We don’t have to go on vacation together to be friends.
Last month I posted a 1-sentence message on our neighborhood Facebook group: “Anybody with kids 3-5 want to meet at the big park downtown this Wednesday at 10am? I bring extra goldfish crackers.” Three people showed up. One comes every week now. It didn’t cost me anything, I didn’t have to plan anything, and if someone doesn’t show up, it’s no big deal. No one expects you to have it all together when the whole thing is built on being casual from the start.
I still don’t have that big crew of mom friends I see in Instagram reels. I still leave playdates early when I feel awkward, I still forget to text people back when I’m busy with work and kid bedtime routines. It’s still harder than it was for my mom’s generation, I think. A lot of that comes from how we live now, and it doesn’t fix itself just by putting yourself out there more. But I don’t spend time anymore chasing the perfect group of friends. The small, messy, low-stakes connections are working just fine for now.
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