Children upend our friendships. Do they have to?

Lessons from life outside of America.

Photo by Chang Duong on Unsplash

A few years ago, when I was living in Nairobi with my now-husband, a good friend of mine had a baby. At the time, none of my close friends had children, but my assumptions about what it meant to have a child were pretty baked in: This friendship was about to change. Goodbye boozy late nights and last-minute weekends away and meeting up for long lunches; goodbye, perhaps, to a shared unvarnished ambition, to that combination of admiration and envy when your friend has an awesome job, to the ability to have undistracted conversations about things other than babies. I wondered if this woman, who is brilliant and ambitious and had a great journalism job, would take a step back professionally, perhaps wouldn’t be on the road reporting so much of the time. I was happy for her, but also a little bit worried. I was still finding my social bearings, and she was one of the first women I really clicked with. How would things change?

The truth is that they really didn’t. It was kind of amazing to watch: My friend and her husband would bring their baby with them to the usual parties in various people’s gardens, or to long dinners out, or to weekends on the coast with friends, and they would stay as late as ever and have as much fun as ever. Their baby became the group baby — at parties, they’d set him up somewhere safe inside where he could sleep, and then they would go grab a glass of wine. They’d check on him regularly, and so would everyone else. Someone always had eyes on that baby, and people were often cooing at or playing with the baby, and that baby could sleep through anything. My friend remained a great friend, now with a new layer of life experience.

She also continued to work and travel, including across borders and well out of town; she and her husband took their child all over the place, and they trusted other adults to keep an eye on him, and they gave him a kind of freedom that would be unimaginable for most American kids. They adore this kid. They also both never stopped having rich, connected, and exciting lives, and they both folded their child in and carved out space for themselves and their relationship. Now he’s a little older, and when I recently visited these same friends at their home in a different city, we went out for a long, late dinner, and another night we had drinks in their garden, and we had a chat with their lovely son but he honestly didn’t seem all that into hanging out with a bunch of adults and that was just fine. When he felt shy or bored, he went inside and entertained himself.

I’ve always been on the fence about having kids, in large part because having kids is such an immense disruption, and I have worked pretty hard to build a pretty fantastic life that I frankly don’t want interrupted. But as I have watched this friend with her kid, and as I’ve watched all of the ways in which she is a tremendous mother but has also kept her sense of self firmly intact I’ve thought: Maybe this is possible.

But also, they’re French.

If you haven’t already seen it, this piece in New York magazine about how having children basically drops a bomb in your friendships is well worth a read. The author is predictably getting a lot of pushback, and her observations are probably the most relevant to college-educated liberal women living in large American cities — the group that is the most likely to spend all of their 20s and much of their 30s in robust social networks of other people without children — but the dynamic she describes is a real one. Reading it felt very in line with experiences I’ve had with American friends in the US. But it felt very out of line with experiences I’ve had with friends outside of the US.

As I’ve watched my friends with kids struggle with impossible competing demands, as I’ve watched my friends without kids stress about having no friends left, as it seems like no one is getting the adulthood we imagined, and as I’ve watched the discourse on friendships between moms and not-moms basically amount to “life changes, it’s on childless women to show up for their mom friends, if you’re complaining it’s because you’re selfish,” I’ve thought: Maybe the problem is the way of parenting particular to the urban-dwelling (or urban-adjacent) college-educated class of upper-middle-class workers perhaps best termed Laptop Americans. This particular kind of intensive parenting is partly self-imposed, but also a rational response to American precariousness and workism — and while it’s highly concentrated among elites, it’s certainly making a class jump. And I’ve wondered, as I’ve watched some friends get swallowed up in it and others try to side-step it: Is there a way to opt out of this whole game?

There is no way to make having a child a non-disruptive event, even if you’re fabulous and French, at least not if you’re even a marginally decent parent. Children need; good parents give. There are only 24 hours in every day. The math does not allow for life to be exactly the same.

But the math in America is particularly difficult.

The changes that are visited upon friendships when a kid comes into the picture are real. Children take up significant time and resources; parents of young children are not nearly as free to go out to a bar on a Friday night or take a group trip or meet up for a last-minute hang. If parents do go out, their time is often constrained: There’s a baby-sitter to relieve, a sleep schedule to adhere to, and just a generalized exhaustion that means a dinner out is at 6pm and doesn’t involve one last drink, that a big group dinner in doesn’t segue into an impromptu late-night dance party. Group vacation suddenly become early-to-bed, early-to-rise, if the parents come at all. And we are all so busy, with work and everything else. For social childless city-dwellers, the calendar is often packed with dinners and parties and cocktail hours and exercise classes and cultural events, not to mention a crazy-demanding job. Every free hour is valuable real estate; do you want to dedicate many of them to the playground with a friend who can only half listen to you?

Children need care; when a child is in the room and needing its caregiver, it can be challenging or impossible for a parent to give their friend their undivided attention. This can be jarring and frustrating if you’re used to friendships that are at least partly premised on deep conversation and connection, or if you’re just a person who wants your friend to actually listen to you when you talk. For some parents (especially mothers), a new child means being out of work, out of the loop socially, at home most of the time, untied from the usual tethers to a bigger life, and also totally overwhelmed (both logistically and emotionally, in ways good and bad) with a small human who needs everything. It can be hard for the childless to relate. It can be hard to know what to do for a friend who is entering a life stage you’ve never experienced, and who doesn’t come out and tell you what they want and need, and who may want and need things that are far out of line with your schedule or abilities or previously-shared preferences. I imagine it can be crushing for parents when their good friends don’t show up in the ways they need, or seem bored by their new lives, or aren’t as invested in a new child as they had hoped, or simply assume they can’t attend various social gatherings. This can all wind up feeling disappointing, or imbalanced, or surprising (and not in a good way) for people on both sides of the divide.

Parenthood is a departure, and a big one — bigger than any other common life milestone. I suspect it feels particularly jarring to women of my generation, who are having children later than any group of women in human history, and who have filled those years with so much else: Friends, travel, education, jobs, years and years of childless, independent adult life unthinkable even a few generations ago. If you get married at 20 and have a kid at 21 and every other person in your social orbit does more or less the same thing, that may not feel like as much of a loss, or a monumental change, even if a kid is by definition a monumental change — you’re still in step with those around you. You’re on a familiar path, and you aren’t departing from a well-established adult life — you’re in the first stages of establishing what adult life will be for you. But if you’re 35, and you’ve spent the last 15 years working hard, developing deep friendships, going on adventures, having a lot of fun, earning a sense of hard-won independence, and, crucially, structuring much of your life around friendship and not a nuclear family, a child changes everything, including, maybe, your idea of yourself — even if you really, really want to have a child. Being a fully-formed adult when you have a child is hugely beneficial to that child’s wellbeing. But it’s also disruptive in some pretty novel ways, including to the friendships that may have been your universe for decades.

It’s telling that many of the responses to the NYMag piece, which lamented the ways in which people on both sides of these post-kid friendships grieve what they’ve lost and at times resent the ways in which their friends aren’t there for them, were along the lines of, “you and all your friends are selfish.”

No. It’s not selfish to want our deepest and most meaningful relationships to persist, and to feel anxiety and anguish when they are upended seemingly overnight. It’s not selfish to see yourself walking into a future you didn’t imagine. Perhaps the most resonant line of the NYMag piece, at least for me, is this:

When did all of my interesting friends become so conventional and heteronormie? I felt disappointed in the squaring of my friend group. I’d imagined my adult life as a certain kind of dinner party attended by people who lived all sorts of different lives, with and without marriage and children, who sought out all different sorts of experiences, who weren’t so traditional. I thought I had the kinds of friends who would be willing to take trips on the fly, or who at the very least would engage with movies and art. Now I had to either familiarize myself with Bluey to have conversations or find new friends to fulfill that fantasy.

I should say here that the author’s imagined life isn’t so different from my real one. I spent the vast majority of my friendship time with women who are either childless or have remained engaged, adventurous, and curious in motherhood. I don’t know what “Bluey” is. It is true that my relationships have shifted as a few of my very close friends have had kids, and have begun to raise them in the crushing American system. But our relationships have also shifted because I’ve moved away and back to our shared city multiple times now, and some of them have moved away, and some of us are married, and the travel demands of my job coupled with a relationship I want to nurture have left me with less time. Also, my close friends with kids have tried really hard to stay connected to me, even with kids in the picture, even if it’s not the same as it once was. And I have tried really hard to stay connected to them, even with moves overseas and moves out of the city. I don’t grieve any of these friendships, because I still have them, just in slightly different form. I trust that we will come back to each other.

I imagine it would be different if I were one of the few women in my group without children. It would certainly feel different if my friends with kids were different kinds of parents — more conventional kinds of parents, I suppose. But I am not the only woman in my group without kids. I’m part of the majority. I don’t feel alone at all.

But boy do I worry. I worry that everyone else will decide to have children, and I’ll wind up the weird social outcast (we’re mostly in our late 30s and early 40s so this is objectively highly unlikely, but anxieties aren’t rational). I worry I’ll decide at the last possible biological second to have a baby and then I’ll be the odd one out, insisting falsely that nothing will change, and then being consigned to the fate of having to make all new “mom-friends,” which strikes me as an endeavor even worse than being forced to have “couples friends” — relationships of convenience with people you only spend time with because you’re both doing roughly the same things at roughly the same time, not because you actually have anything resembling a real connection. I worry that I’m a bad friend to my friends with kids, because to be honest I have no idea how to help, and I’m always out of town for the birthday parties.

Mostly, though, I read articles like the one in New York mag, and they profoundly resonate, and I also think: Parenthood is hard everywhere, but parenthood is made so much harder in America.

Part of the reason why American parents see their lives so upended by childbearing is that the American way is so profoundly individualistic and hyper-focused on productivity. Even our infrastructure is isolating: We live in a culture that prioritizes largeness and space, and so the middle-class dream is a single-family home, which mostly means driving a personal vehicle to and from work, often in a soulless office park or a central business district where people don’t actually live. And at least the office park has other people in it. Our new work-from-home norm can be great — more time with your kids! — but can also reinforce this nuclear family isolation.

I’m often struck when traveling even to pretty small European towns to see how much of life congregates around public squares. On summer nights in any given town (or at least in many given towns), people of all ages are out and about, teenagers eyeing each other, parents with new babies staying up well past bedtime, old ladies having drinks with friends. It is profoundly pro-social, and deeply connective.

I cannot think of a single city in America that works like this. In a few enclaves, perhaps, but even in New York it is far from the norm. Late nights are the domain of the young and single. Public parks are not teeming at 10pm with families and gaggles of teenagers and wine-swilling grannies. This kind of multigenerational usage of public space also helps to shore up the social contract: The idea that we’re all part of something bigger than ourselves, and all a little bit responsible for its wellbeing.

The American way is much smaller: There’s a sense that we are responsible for the wellbeing of our family unit, and not much beyond it. This sensibility is behind so many of our ills, from our lack of a robust social safety net to conservative justifications for easy access to deadly weapons. And of course it makes life within that family unit smaller, more insular, more isolated, and so much harder.

I think of this too when I eat out outside of America, even in pricey European cities like Paris. No one is counting down your 90-minute window before you have to leave your table. A glass of wine is a fraction of its cost in New York (last month, in Rome, my husband looked at the wine list of 20 euro bottles and asked, “Is this by the glass?” I laughed at him — obviously not — and then last weekend I paid $46 for two glasses of wine in Brooklyn). There are so many relatively affordable places to eat, and families eating out in restaurants is the norm, and a “kid-friendly restaurant” isn’t nearly as much of a thing, and what children learn early-on — at least in some cultures — is that eating is a pleasure, and eating is communal. It’s not microwave fish sticks in front of the TV. It’s family and friends coming together, sharing an experience. This is emphasized outside of the family as well. In countries including France and Italy, children in daycare and school sit down and eat a shared meal together, often prepared by an in-school chef. There is no political constituency for claiming ketchup is a vegetable or complaining that someone tried to replace Mystery Meat with eggplant or insisting that we must feed our kids ultra-processed garbage because they’ll throw anything else away.

Some individual American families try to impose better values on their kids. Maybe they cook healthy meals most nights, and gather around a shared table without screens. But individual family culture cannot replace a national culture. And an individual family culture of at-home shared meals can’t be easily established if one or both parents are working nights, or cobbling together multiple jobs, or the only grocery store with fresh vegetables is two bus rides away, or a little unhealthy food treat is the only indulgence you can afford to give your kid. As a result, Americans end up not just physically unhealthy, but less connected and more insular. And really basic, connective, pleasurable social behaviors like slow meals enjoyed in groups become luxuries, not norms.

I think of this sometimes when I go to dinner in New York with a friend who has kids, who can only be there because her partner or babysitter is at home, who didn’t bring her kid maybe because she wants a night off, but also because kids in intimate New York City restaurants past 7pm are not the norm, and also her kid isn’t used to being in restaurants late into the evening so of course the kid will fuss or cry or do something that will pull her out of the moment. This isn’t me romanticizing European post-parenthood friendships as universally easy to maintain, or saying “French kids don’t cry in restaurants” (post-parenthood friendships are hard to maintain everywhere, and French kids definitely cry in restaurants). But at least in my admittedly limited experience, pro-social cultures make for more socially-connected parents, and kids tend to be less disrupted by things like a long dinner out if having long dinners out with friends is a normal part of their young lives, and not an aberration from their usual routine. In America, we generally don’t make these communal, kid-inclusive pleasures possible, not for adults and not for families — not logistically and not culturally.

And not financially. My god everything is so expensive here. We pay for health insurance. We pay exorbitant sums for housing, and even more if you want a home in an area with good schools, because in what feels like a sick joke schools are funded by property taxes — the kids from the wealthiest families wind up with the best-resourced schools, as if that makes any sense. Daycare can cost as much as rent. If you want to feed your kid meat that wasn’t factory-farmed and isn’t chock full of hormones and antibiotics or vegetables that are fresh and not canned, you’re looking at double the grocery bill. Because of how we live, most families need cars, and cars cost money, and so does car insurance, and so does gas. Oh and so does heat and electricity and maintenance for the large houses Americans are more likely to occupy.

And while you can opt out of some of the craziness of American parenthood, it’s awfully difficult to opt out of all of it. The stakes in the US so so high. Inequality is starker; and I suspect feels especially perilous to the Laptop Americans who are affluent but not tippy-top-of-the-heap wealthy, even though by any rational measure they are doing fine. But there is a pervasive and wholly rational fear that, unless one makes every effort to give their child a leg up, their child will fall down the socioeconomic ladder. Inter-class competition is steep: For example, the uber-wealthy maintain an advantage in college admissions, while the much larger group of middle- and upper-middle-class parents find that their children are at a disadvantage compared to both the very rich and the working class (working-class kids, obviously, are at a disadvantage more broadly that makes them less likely to pursue college in the first place). So it’s easy to make fun of the hyper-competitive urban-adjacent parents who stress out about which preschool their kid will go to before that kid is even out of the womb. But every little differentiator between your kid and the one down the block feels like it can add up to the difference between stability and struggle, a happy life or one that languishes. In a very different context, George Packer wrote about this dynamic thusly:

[I]n recent decades, the system has hardened into a new class structure in which professionals pass on their money, connections, ambitions, and work ethic to their children, while less educated families fall further behind, with little chance of seeing their children move up.

When parents on the fortunate ledge of this chasm gaze down, vertigo stuns them. Far below they see a dim world of processed food, obesity, divorce, addiction, online-education scams, stagnant wages, outsourcing, rising morbidity rates—and they pledge to do whatever they can to keep their children from falling. They’ll stay married, cook organic family meals, read aloud at bedtime every night, take out a crushing mortgage on a house in a highly rated school district, pay for music teachers and test-prep tutors, and donate repeatedly to overendowed alumni funds. The battle to get their children a place near the front of the line begins before conception and continues well into their kids’ adult lives. At the root of all this is inequality—and inequality produces a host of morbid symptoms, including a frantic scramble for status among members of a professional class whose most prized acquisition is not a Mercedes plug-in hybrid SUV or a family safari to Maasai Mara but an acceptance letter from a university with a top‑10 U.S. News & World Report ranking.

All of these demands feel real to the parents struggling to meet them, because they are real, even if they sound out of touch to people outside of these rarified enclaves. And even for parents outside of these rarified enclaves, the demands are intense: Signing your kid up for after-school activities, monitoring screen time, cooking healthy meals, doing enriching cultural activities, helping with homework, paying more for a home in a better school district, maybe saving up for an SAT prep class. Involved parents in any socioeconomic class get the message that raising a successful child starts young: With exclusive breastfeeding, with reading books to them, maybe with classical music on repeat while they’re still in the womb. Maximizing a child’s potential is extremely demanding. And in a country where one can fall so far so easily, and where the bottom is often so brutal, who wouldn’t try to maximize their child’s potential?

It is not this way everywhere. In many of our economic peer nations, the top is not as high, but the bottom is not nearly as low.

I’m emphasizing the individual choices and culture here, but of course there are all of the systemic barriers to being a parent and also having a life. You’re probably familiar with them: No federally mandated paid leave; no national childcare scheme; no affordable daycare; no universal healthcare; a school year that doesn’t reflect the reality that most parents work outside the home; few limits on working hours and few worker protections, which creates a culture of overwork at the top end and cobbled-together part-time jobs at the bottom. I look around at my exceptionally lucky life and I see a packed workweek, a partner who wants and deserves my attention, friendships I continue to cultivate, travel for both work and play, regular physical exercise that I need to keep me physically and emotionally healthy, home-cooked meals most nights that also keep me physically functional, novelty and art that fill my soul, and I wonder where a child would fit in. I suspect that for many parents, one of the many things that gives is friendship.

This is a policy problem, and it is a culture problem.

My friends who are raising their kids outside of the US don’t have it easy. When we talk about parenthood, they all say, this is hard. Oh my fucking god is this hard. This is hard beyond imagination; I don’t travel like I used to, I don’t go out like I used to, my relationship doesn’t feel like it used to, my body doesn’t feel like it used to, I can’t work like I used to, and my heart is bigger than it used to be but I am also so so tired. Many of them also feel isolated and lonely and grieving a past self or a ghost life they might have lived.

But what I don’t see is a norm of working 50 or 60 hours a week, of squeezing in ten minutes to read a bedtime story before returning to late-night emails, of stressing over the exorbitant cost of daycare, of worrying that if their kid doesn’t go to the right kindergarten they’ll never get into the right college and then won’t have the right kind of life.

What I don’t hear from them is the intense, omnipresent anxiety that, unless they do every tiny thing right, their child might not be ok. 

It’s that anxiety among many American parents, I think, that has cleaved open even wider the gaps between the have-kids and the have-nots, especially among professionals in large cities. Because it means that the only good way to do this parenting thing — the only possible way, if you’re a moderately functional adult who has achieved a pretty good life and wants your kid to have the same — is to give it your all: your money, your time, your attention, your worry, your ambition. This, again, feels especially true for women, many of whom have essentially professionalized motherhood. Maybe you can carve out time for the small handful of friendships you value the very most. But I can see how it would feel like there’s barely any space in there for you, let alone for a network of friends who fell in love with the old you. 

And those friends, by the way, are also stretched thin. The competition and precariousness of American life breeds exhaustion and resentment: The childless workers who are frustrated when yet again they are told to stay late and cancel their plans so that a parent can go to the school play; the couple out on a much-needed date they can barely afford who can’t focus on their conversation because of a shrieking toddler; the single woman trying to buy an affordable home who keeps losing out because sellers want their house to go to a young family, and because young families often have two incomes. The parents aren’t at fault in any of these situations. But the people without children also aren’t selfish jerks. Our policies and cultural norms pit us against each other.

About a year ago, I moved out of New York City to a small village in upstate New York. It’s darling and charming and progressive, and for a tiny place it has a lot: multiple restaurants and bars, Pilates, several art galleries, a hipster barber shop, a yoga studio, a shoppy-shop that sells expensive candles and tinned fish and imported wooden children’s toys. There are a surprising number of women here who are around my age and don’t have kids, and many lovely ones who do. I’ve made friends, and I like it. 

But as I’ve struggled with the question of whether or not to have children, I look at my life here and I feel a hard no. I picture myself alone in my house, snow piled up outside, trying to write through winter depression and a crying baby. Even in the thriving summer season, everything closes by 10. Daycare, school — it’s all a drive away. Even with a wonderful partner, motherhood looks pretty isolated up here. I picture a future here with a kid, and I picture a world that has narrowed into the impossibly small.

Earlier this year, I visited a friend in Athens. Her daughter is almost two, and she was pregnant with her second. We had sushi with her husband and her child, and then her husband took their kid to the park, where a bunch of other parents and kids were playing. It was just after dark, and she and I got ice cream and walked around, catching up. Strolling through the park, she greeted a handful of other women — acquaintances, friends, parents of her daughter’s friends. Life wasn’t easy, she said — motherhood is so fucking hard, so shockingly hard, and how was she supposed to work the way she once worked, and raise kids the way she wanted to raise her kids? 

None of it is easy. But there she was with me, her friend. And there were so many other people, some of whom she knew, some of whom were much older or much younger, all of whom were out enjoying an early-summer Greek night.

xx Jill