Are mum friends, real friends?

My closest friend is the first mum I spoke to at the school gates over 30 years ago. We have been through so much together. I’m godmother to both her grandchildren and she has been a rock during my cancer battle. She is closer to me than my sister but our dc have not been close since age 11.

I've raised 2 children through primary school. I made great friends with my first child's friends mums. When they left primary school, I never saw them again. They'd all moved on, some moved away, some went back to work full time. Their lives changed in different directions. With my youngest I expected the same to happen. People use each other at different stages of life. I am no longer useful to other mums as they no longer need play dates/school run favours etc. Such is life.

I think by the time most women have children today - into their 30s - they have an established group of friends. The friends you make in your late teens and twenties when you have all the time in the world to just hang out, form close bonds and discover the world together are different to those who you make when you are older, have more pressures, and your free time is not really entirely your own.

I currently have some close friends that I adore who I met through the DC, but I don't know how long these friendships would realistically last if one of us moved away and we didn't have the shared school run/rugby fields/same life stage factors going on. But for now we enjoy each other's company and help each other out when needed, and I see them far more often than I do my oldest friends. But when I do see my oldest friends whom I've known since university, it is clear the depth of those connections is far more durable and deep than those I have with my mum friends whom I've only known for a few years.

None of my mum friends are real friends.

I think you can be lucky with mum friends if you have something more to bond over.

I've had many mum friends but few of them have stuck.Some abandoned us when my eldest showed signs of disability,some drifted.I have a small group of SEND mums who I'm close to but our lives are dedicated to our dcs. I think it's really hard maintaining any type of social life with dcs (speaking from my experience of having no child care).

This. My best friends, like yours, are from university and a time spent working abroad. Mum friends locally were great when the children were little but now the DC are much older I don't long to see mum friends as I do my old friends who are geographically scattered. Perhaps friendships are more intense / invested in before you have children? Or perhaps if you've got a lovely circle of old friends there's not the need for newer friends and subconsciously you hold back? Pondering...

You don't want to go to the meet up's beforehand?
My mum friends are very important to me. One poster said the friendship doesn't survive if you move away? Most don't! So I can't see how that applies?

They can be but I think most are situational.

It depends really but for me I get tired when we always have to meet with the kids, if someone won't meet for a drink, coffee or do something without kids then I find it hard to think of it as a real friendship especially when the kids are school age. I've made some really special friends that I've known over 10 years now. My mum still has friends for over 40 years from my school days but sadly still sees them as 'mum friends' and is a bit arms length.

I think mum friends can become real friends. My ex walked out when my DC were 6 and 4 and we’d only been living in the town a few months. Some of the school mums I’d only known for play dates and coffee for a couple of months because my lifeline as they watched the kids while I went for job interviews, listened to me spill my guts out after school drop off when I was a wreck. 10 years later some of these women are my closest friends despite the fact the kids barely hang out any more!

As long as they are interesting people a d can actually talk about stuff other than children, and you can do things together without the kids holding you together, of course they can be good friends.

I think there is a big difference between being friendly with someone and being friends with someone.

Met my best friend at the school gates 8 years ago! Other Mum 'friends' have drifted now don't need to facilitate play dates or when the kids were no longer friends.

I've had three sets. First two sets phased out by time kids were about 11 (a slow decrease from reception)

Ds is 8 from his group I'm still friends with 2 women. 1 I'm very close with and still see her most weeks. If neither of us move I imagine we will stay friends

My mum friends are... I'd say max 2 hours in the park/coffee shop/softplay or a playdate friends. Whereas I could go away for a week with either of my very best friends and not get sick of them, but only one is a childhood friend - the other was my neighbour in halls at uni.

I think it's luck. Had I met uni best friend at an NCT group we'd have got on just as well.

My two closest friends started as Mum friends - our kids now range from 41 to 32. One of my friends died young but I'm still in touch with her DD. The other friend lives abroad but we have remained in touch and see her and her DH regularly

Well they could be close friends or they might not be?

As PP says it's like work friends - some may become close friends but others may not

I'm still very close with one of my mum friends. We commiserated through the tough years of work and child-rearing and, now that our children are grown, we're both retired and hang out a lot. We do lunch, shopping, go to the beach, exercise together, etc. I've sat with her during chemo treatments and she held my hand when my daughter had several hospitalizations during her teen years. Mum friends can be lifetime friends.

It depends. I have what I call ‘friends of circumstance’ and real friends from these mum friend groups- I don’t mean that in a bad way. When my first DC started primary school- a large group of us became friends and for many years we did a lot together- play dates, dinners, even time away together etc. However that first DC is now a teenager, and some of those friends and I have naturally drifted apart, we’d say hello and chat politely if I bumped into them- but they’re no longer my friends. They were what I’d call ‘friends of circumstance’ even though I really enjoyed the friendship back then. Then around 5 of those mum friends have gone on to be very close friends who I still see regularly and do a lot with. Some are even godmothers to my subsequent children.

I have another group of mum friends not made through school but through groups and classes or friend of friends too, again, some have drifted away but some I still see and really enjoy hanging out with.

My absolute closest friends will always be my school friends though. I think there’s no ‘right’ answer here.

I agree some people are weirdly dismissive of "mum friends", you usually then get the comment "they just happen to have given birth the same year as you", which makes no sense really.

Unless you also say to your kids "Oh don't bother making friends with those kids, they just happen to be in the same class /tutorial/ hall of residence as you". I prefer to think you'll always find some like minded people wherever you go in life. Even shudder in the school playground!

Friends you make in your school days and late teens and early 20s are there in a time of your life when you have oodles of time for each other and are sharing exiting times all the time - like boyfriend/boyfriend troubles, leaving school getting first jobs, leaving home, getting engaged maybe, getting pregnant ect.

'Mum' friends are, by their very name, made in the years when these big milestones are over with and everybody is a bit knackered and a bit busy and have been there and done it with the daily contact stuff of friendships when you're young and free.

You're doing the school run every day plus a million other things and you've found a mate. That's great! But they're also doing all the same stuff and being pulled in lots of different directions too and you both have an understanding that you can meet up sort of regularly and not always respond within minutes of texting and it's ok. You're gown ups with shit going on.

You look back on your old friends from old days and remember how intense and amazing it felt and maybe think this means these new friendships are less somehow. They're not - it's just that we've changed. My opinion anyway.

Perhaps it's because you don't meet that often, and you are part of a group all the time. I have a group like that, I enjoy it, have fun when I go and I do think we all care about each other, having known each other a good long time, but it's not the same as a one-on-one friendship of the type I have with several other people. I think friendships aren't all one thing, and pushing them to be different than they are never works.

Same - people seem really dismissive of "mum friends" but if you click with someone, it makes no difference how you met them?

My best friends are people I met on the school run, I have zero friends from when I was at school myself, I have really good friends from my 1st job, never see anyone from a job I was at for 11 years ..... It's the person, not how you met

I think thay if you add a prefix then the friendship is not necessailrily as deep as a 'just' friend.

Work friend is someone I'm friends with because we work together but once one of olus moves on. We're unlikely going to be in close contact. So if they're friends then they're friends. But to me mumfriend indicates that they haven't transfered to just friend category yet.

And im not necessarily referring to how you talk about then. Sometimes it is easier to say mumfriend, work friend, school friend etc. To other people. But hiw you think about them.

Some are some aren’t

There is one school mum I regard as a friend. We have connected on a deeper level due to our DC having similar additional needs.
The other mums are nice enough. But they are acquaintances not friends.