Why It’s Harder to Make Mom Friends as an Adult (And What Actually Works)
Last Tuesday, I leaned against the chipped brick wall outside my 4-year-old’s preschool, a half-drunk oat milk latte sweating through its cardboard sleeve in my hand, watching another group of moms laugh as they walked together to their cars. I’d just finished a perfectly nice two-minute chat with a woman whose son is in the same class as mine—we commiserated about the recent stomach bug that wiped out both our households, agreed that the new drop-off line system is a minor improvement over last year’s chaos, then waved and turned to go our separate ways. No exchange of phone numbers, no mention of meeting up later. We both had places to be, and that was that.
When I was pregnant with my first kid, I pictured a very different life. I’d join weekly playgroups, meet a tight crew of fellow moms who got it, trade babysitting on date nights, meet for brunch after drop-off, have someone to text at 2 a.m. when you’re panicking about a weird rash. Five years in, I have one close mom friend I met at a prenatal yoga class before the pandemic, and a rotating cast of casual drop-off and soccer practice acquaintances. I still leave most parent events wondering why it feels so much harder than it did to make friends when I was younger, when I could strike up a conversation with a random person at a bar and leave with a new friend to road trip with a month later.
A couple months back, I forced myself to go to a “mom connect” night hosted by our preschool. It was at a local brewery, I paid $12 for a ticket, arranged for my husband to leave work early to watch the kids, and showed up alone. I spent 45 minutes holding a sparkling water, making small talk with three different women about car seat hacks and preschool tuition. Every conversation petered out after 10 minutes, everyone kept glancing at their phones to check for babysitter texts, and most people were gone by 8 p.m. No one asked anyone for their number, no one suggested getting together again. I drove home thinking, this is just how it is now?
The more I’ve thought about it, the more the barriers feel really tangible, not just me being awkward. For one thing, no one has extra time. When you’re a mom, any free time you have is already sliced into tiny, pre-allocated pieces. Planning a new social activity means shifting work schedules, coordinating childcare, working around nap times, practice, and doctor’s appointments. When I meet a mom I click with, the first thought in my head isn’t “I want to hang out with her” it’s “When the hell would we ever fit that in?” We’re also all spread out across very different lives, even when our kids are the same age. I work full time from my home office, so my free time is after 5 p.m. and on weekends. A lot of the stay-at-home moms I meet are free on weekday mornings, when I’m sitting in meetings. Some people have three kids, some have one, some are co-parenting, some are single—even small differences in schedule can make aligning plans feel impossible.
Post-pandemic, I also think a lot of us got used to keeping our circles small. The weekly playgroups that used to be the default way to meet other moms never bounced back for a lot of communities, and a lot of us are still a little rusty at making small talk with new people. Social media doesn’t help either—scrolling through Instagram, it feels like everyone else has this big, tight group of mom best friends, so if you don’t, you feel like you’re the only one failing at it, which makes you even less likely to put yourself out there.
I’ve tried a few small things over the past year that have actually worked, though, nothing fancy. The first is that I stopped saying the vague “we should get coffee sometime” and started inviting people to something I was already doing that day. A few months back, after that same drop-off chat I mentioned earlier, I said “I’m heading to the new playground on Oak Street after this to wear my kid out before lunch—want to come with?” It didn’t require any extra planning, no childcare swap, no booking a table at a café. She said yes, we went, and we’ve gone twice more since.
The second thing I did was lower the bar for what counts as a friend. I used to think I needed a new best friend I could vent to about in-laws and traumatic labors at any time. Now I’m happy to have a playground friend I chat with while our kids climb, a mom from the allergy parent support group I swap snack label tips with, and a trail walking friend I see once a week on Saturday mornings. Speaking of that—my third trick was joining a recurring weekly activity instead of one-off mixers. The trail walk I go to has the same 8 to 10 people every week, same time same place, so you don’t have to force deep conversation the first time. You just chat while you walk, week after week, and it builds slowly without the pressure of a “meet new friends” event.
I still stand alone at drop-off some mornings, watching other groups laugh and wonder if I’m missing something. I still leave some parent events feeling lonely. But I’ve stopped blaming myself for it. It’s not that I’m bad at making friends—it’s just that making friends as an adult mom is actually harder. The barriers are real, and they’re not going anywhere. Right now, the small, low-stakes connections are enough. We’re planning a trip to the local pumpkin patch next weekend, me and that playground mom and our kids. No babysitter, no fancy plans. We’ll probably spend half the time wiping pumpkin guts off sweatshirts and half the time complaining about how much admission costs. That fits perfectly into our messy, over-scheduled lives right now, and that’s more than enough for me.
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