To think most “mum friendship groups” are just thinly veiled cliques?

I suppose it boils down to some people thinking women should 'bekind' and its 'nice' to he friendly to everyone and being a people pleaser and it coming as a shock to realise that others have boundaries.

As someone else said, they're friends not people offering a public service.

Is that like the US Southern 'Bless your Heart'?...😆

Most of similar threads has an op who stands on her own at the side, on her phone, glaring at 'THE CLIQUE' in absolute fury that they aren't dashing across with open arms, insisting she must join them! Whilst of course ignoring all the other school mums around that the OP is also ignoring...

Do the dads who play 5 aside football, for example, get accused of similar or just the mean mums? What about friends from work, are they ok?

Exactly.

I really can't get my head around being bothered by it.

There are always groups of mean girls. They grow up to be mean women at the school gates.
They are in the minority.

Most groups are normal, close knit friendship groups. They won’t be excluding people deliberately. They just don’t want to change the nice dynamic they have by adding more people.

So it’s probably not easy to infiltrate the groups of school mums and that’s difficult if you really want a group of school mum friends, but I don’t think most have a mean agenda.

Look at the other people standing on their own. Maybe they don’t have the confidence to make friends and they may be feeling like you do.

Errr no it isn’t.

I couldn't agree more, I always found this to be the case.

I don't think its necessarily a SAHM thing but I do think it correlates heavily with women who have given up their social life at a stroke when they find a bloke, settle down and have kids.

I'm convinced its the same people who post about how friendships are too much "drama" and they'd rather spend all their time with "my little family".

Then five years on when their kids start school it dawns on them that they've forgotten how to talk to other adults outside their family and they get huffy because other women still have friends.

It's what you make of it, a chat about school, how the children are doing, what the teachers are like, a bit of child care on play dates, an odd coffee, or a lasting friendship, who knows where these random meetings end up.

I worked (more than) full time while kids at school but often had a few minutes waiting at the gates for a chat or a coffee dropping off or picking up or hosting play dates, a few trips to theme parks, nothing very heavy.

I'm very far from popular, don't have a large friendship group and never engaged with anyone at the school gates apart from maybe a nod. But I never considered that the groups of parents that were friends were exclusionary or a clique.
In fact when I did go to class catch up it just appeared they were friends - some went to the same university even, a couple worked together etc. Possibly others met through the school and found common interests - but not sure why that is exclusionary.

I made mum friends even though i was rarely at the school. We're we a clique, because we choose to see each other socially? I guess it would have been easy, on the occasions I was there, to see other groups as a 'clique', but often it was because they were women who knew each other for a long time already and I was just x's mum.

I suppose there are also 'cliques' at my gym. A bunch of people who go to lots of classes and see each other socially. I'm not in it, because I'm a casual gym goer. And maybe I'm just not someone who would fit with them. That's just life.

I guess you could also say the old people on my street are in a clique. Or maybe it's just that they've known each other a long time and have lots of shared experiences. They're friendly enough, but friendlier with each other.

I think they often start outside the gate as “support” but invariably descend into unpleasantness and an over inflated ego as to communicating with school.
When some members try to speak for all parents and things get organised without the inclusion of all parental views and knowledge and descend into gossip and exclusion they are not helpful.

I find it interesting that these best of mates groups invariably disappear once kids leave these schools. They aren’t real friendships and absolutely are all about politics- keeping in so your kid is, making sure your kid can compete and is competing academically and socially, being by privy to all the gossip…. When do they ever include the struggling parents of any category? They are
often the parents that are gossiped about and excluded in these groups .

If it’s any help op schools have similar views. I’d do your own thing and make your own real friends it’s a much healthier role model for kids. Contact school if you don’t feel you are getting all the info you need or your views aren’t being included. Get your kids to value quality in friends, not quantity.

Honestly if you're noticing patterns, it's you. Sorry!

I can only assume this is all about you OP. Exactly what opportunities have these women kept from you and your child? You seem very low on details.

The best way to get more involved is literally to get more involved. Join the PTA, volunteer to listen to readers at school, help out at events or fundraisers.

It’s not always about laughter and lattes; sometimes it’s about social hierarchy, even among mums.

I can honestly say that in 26 years of parenting and many of those as a parent of children at school, I have never encountered one of these cliques.

'Even among mums'? What on earth does that mean?

There were friendship groups, some.smaller, some larger. There were individual friendships.

People aren't obliged to he friends or include anyone else.

Some of the 'mums' who didn't work seemed to form stronger friendship groups. My youngest was at a school where there was a fairly big friendship group of women who didn't work (ladies who lunched) and even though our childen are now at university, they are still friends and go on holidays together etc.

I suppose some insecure and desperate to he part of something bigger or lonely people might have regarded them as a clique. But to everyone else, they were just a group of friends who had chosen to be friends. It wasn't a public group open to everyone.

I think school groups are different from most other ways people make friends - for one thing there you are seeing / meeting loads of other mums (or parents) all at once, regularly but for only short periods of time and the only immediately obvious thing you have in common is that your kids are in the same class / school.

Groups formed tend to be larger than usual and looser - there was one mum in my eldest's class I almost never saw as her day off was a day I worked, whereas the others mostly coincided with me more often. I never fully knew exactly who were actual friends with each other and who were just part of the group (all the 'middle class' mums) - it had started between those who had older children. I was included in social events but never felt fully part of things as my child didn't get on well with other kids (ADHD / ASD). I liked some of the other mums a lot and not others, some ignored me.

Situation with the younger child was totally different 4 years later in same school. There wasn't an established group - over time we found each other (some of us at the local play park where we hung about after school). Also lots of dads involved. We got to know each other through chatting / play dates etc. As adults (couples sometimes) we went to the pub or school events together. One couple overlapped with the older child's group and we got to know them better due to this. We still see most of these people socially on occasion, even though our kids are now all over 18.

A lot of school parent groups aren't actually fixed, they dissolve and regroup. I had a loose group from when youngest started secondary but that fizzled out when my child changed her friendship groups.

But I wasn't aware of anyone being toxic as such. On the contrary. Though my closest friend during the early primary years was a work colleague who had an older child at my kids' school. We often sloped off for coffee alone together as we had much more in common.

It does not miss the point. I work full time and I don’t engage with any school gate crap. I don’t feel excluded, I remember things all by myself and I don’t need random school mums to support me because I have other friends. It’s simply not an issue that’s on my radar, It has literally never occurred to me to care about my social standing in the school playground.

@SharpMintReader

Agree that having a full life outside the school gates helps, most of us do. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t talk about how social dynamics play out in those spaces. Dismissing the issue as something only people without jobs or hobbies notice kind of misses the point.

But again, why is network selection considered legitimate when it happens outside school but "bitchy" and "cliquey" when it happens at school?

This happens in literally every environment which involves some social contact. Why should school be a utopia of everyone being invited to everything?

Thrives on hierarchy and control? Really?

Seriously is this a SAHM thing because I don’t know any working parents who have the time or energy for this crap. I literally drop them at school and run to work 🫤

It’s less about craving inclusion, more about recognising how subtle power plays can operate in everyday spaces.

Now you're trying to intellectualise "the big girls won't play with me" into social analysis.

Humans are a social species. There are hierarchies and power plays in endless situations. In general we don't notice because those are the social waters in which we swim.

I don't know why you expect women at the school gate to be any different from workplaces, clubs or anywhere else where many people are clustered regularly.