Why do so many mums ditch their childfree friends?

They don't.

Have you told your friends how you feel?

Having children is a massive life change and with big life changes it gets easier to drift apart from friendships. Some people aren't as available for friends once they get a partner or a demanding job. A baby is a huge change to navigate, some may pull back from their child free friends because they no longer relate to the stuff that's talked about and some might feel embarrassed that they don't have anything to contribute to a catch up except their baby did something cute or met a milestone that has absolutely no significance to anyone else. If it's a solid friendship things should settle and come back around but sometimes people just don't have anything in common anymore.

Yeah all those childless people who don’t know what tired is. What busy is. What real love is. What stress is. What it is to put anyone before themselves. How dare they even ever complain about ANYTHING! They know nothing!

This happened to me in my 20s. There was a group of 4 of us and 3 all fell pregnant and had young babies within a year or two of each other. Im not able to have kids and honestly they just had more in common. It really hurt at the time to hear they'd met up without me but they were all at the same point of their lives and I wasnt there. I started spending more time with other friends. Life sometimes just goes in different directions.

I had two childfree friends until my kids were in their teens but over time the gap between us continued to widen and we are no longer friends.

They would see it like you do from their perspective of me not fulfilling their needs while they haven’t changed the parameters.

I see it differently and have experienced it differently.

They needed much, much more from the relationship than the capacity I had in friendships. None of my friends who were parents and had partners had the relationship demands that those who didn’t have those had.

Fundamentally they saw it as my responsibility to meet those needs and demands and I didn’t have the capacity.

I think becoming a parent changes who you are as a person very fundamentally and that change continues over time.

As someone who entered motherhood later than many of my good friends
my experience is in complete contrast to yours. I maintained my friendships with my friends when they become mothers and I was child free. It was when I had children that my child free friends slowly but surely ebbed away from my life despite me reaching out to them.

At the end of the day friendships are not static things, they ebb and flow, grow stronger and weaker and really are very fluid. Sometimes you just move apart from some friends as your lives are just so different and what bonded you before is no longer.

I thought that before I had children.

Has been the opposite with me. I had my children later in life and all through my single years was a loyal friend to many friends with partners and children. When I had my children and wasnt as able to travel to them, many of my friends no longer bother making any effort to meet me. Those with older children, childless, single. I now have a few close friends who I know value me.

And this is why as soon as a friend of mine gets pregnant I stop bothering with them. Absolutely anything in my life becomes “trivial and insignificant”. Yet mums often complain that their childless friends “stopped bothering with them”. 🤣🤣

In the beginning I could get this (baby/early toddlerhood).
But after this stage - I don’t want to be sat with my friends just discussing my children (as much as I adore them).
There are other interesting things in life to share/discuss with friends (childless or not).

Now I see the problem, and the reason your friends don't contact you.

This is it. As you get older, everyone is busy doing various things.

Being a mum isn’t like having a busy work and social life. It’s a 24/7 thing, especially when they’re babies and toddlers. (And when you’re back at work, it’s 100 times more challenging.) I tended to hang out with mums when I was in that stage because I was struggling and exhausted; I needed to be around people who understood me. Most of these weren’t long-lasting or deep friendships, but they were important nevertheless. Your friends’ lives have changed. Try not to take it personally.

Secondly the chat isn’t quite on the same wavelength. They’re going on about some dumb bloke messing them about for the umpteenth time, or some trivial office gossip that one time would've been ultimately interesting but now that all sinks into insignificance. You fall in love with your child and you are obsessed with every aspect of their being - it’s hard to suppress that for any length of time to give a shiny shit about Emma-from-HR’s hen do drama.

So you do think that people without children lead silly, trivial, meaningless lives compared to yours?

You’ve posted about this before, haven’t you, OP? I remember the specific detail about the soft play coffee, you travelling to them, and feeling hard done by because you’d shelled out a lot of money on hen parties, weddings, showers etc. Honestly, try to let go of the resentment and focus your attention elsewhere in friendship terms. You also sound as if you’re generalising hugely from one single group of friends to something being a general rule. I only had DS at 40, over a decade after many of my friends had children, and they didn’t ‘drop’ me.

I hardly see my best friends these days. One other of the group has kids but they're much older so she's not relying on babysitters or anything any more. They all see each other more than I see any of them so maybe we could turn your argument around?
Except I'm busy with my kid, friend is busy with a job that's a lot of evenings and weekends, another busy setting up a side hustle..everyone's busy in their own way. None of us are taking it personally.

I found it the other way round. Stop getting invited out. People are suddenly to busy to chat. If you invite them over or to meet for coffee. They will let you know...

They come back when the kids are older. I think it is just that babies and toddlers are full on - you can't just send them off into town with a £20 note.

I had friends who were very glad to have some adult talk, but we still had to fit visits around picking children up from school etc. And it simply was easier for me to travel to them, as I don't have to pack nappies, change of clothes, car seats, etc, etc.

Now we're in our 50s, and the kids are secondary/uni/working, meet-ups are usually easier, but adults are generally busy, and with my three groups of women friends, we're often booking a weekend months in advance because of working round work, conferences, elderly parents, other family,weekend hobby classes, etc, etc. Adults have busy lives.

I have a friend who has been distant since I became a mum. She claims she’s busy but she works part time and is child free. I work full time and have a toddler and I’m a single mum! She only comes back to me when she wants emotional support.

You sound horrendous. I would ditch you

I don't really have many parent friends because I don't like kids and don't like being around them. That said, I do have a couple of friends who are mothers who love being around me because I am so far from being child centred. I wouldn't want to be friends with the people you describe anyway.

My goodness! Have you ever let slip that you thought you'd bought their friendship forever? That might be a clue as to why they're not keen to see you.
It might make you feel a bit less hard done by if you grow up a bit and understand life (and other people) don't stand still. Things do not stay the same. It's time you
moved on. It can't be good for you to spend your life feeling so bitter.

In truth, when they hang out with other mum friends, I think the friendship angle is secondary to what is actually happening and that’s the parenting. It’s basically parenting with some chat, not a friendship with children happening to be there.

It was nice of you to arrange a soft play meet up, to accommodate them, but they might not think to contact you to make plans because the thinking is not ‘what friend would I like to see’ but ‘what can I do with the kids and who else might want to do it’ (and their friends with kids are coming at it from same angle).

Genuinely, I was often embarrassed to meet with my childfree friends, because I was super exhausted, felt like I could never complete a sentence or thought and it wasn’t fair to the other person to not have a proper conversation. I often made plans and then had to cancel them because I’d had a horrible sleep, etc. And then I stopped making plans.
I had a friend express to me (when my child was about 3) how angry she was that I disappeared from her life. I apologised and tried to explain - there were extenuating health circumstances in my child’s case - but I felt like we didn’t really resolve it.
18 months down the track, her child now 11 months old, she apologised to me saying how tough she’s found the first year and the time she had to socialise she spends with the 2 other new mums within a street or two of her flat.
5 years on, we’re back to seeing eachother more and we’re both so grateful to have eachother in our lives.
If you can, hold out that your mum friends are probably desperate for your company again, and will be extremely happy to see you on the other side of the fog of tiny children.

People with children are single mindedly obsessed with their child. They want and need to talk about the minutae of its movements. They make friends in the early days through groups and clubs and find like minded mums with whom they can discuss poo texture , then weaning, then potty training, then schools.
When they meet up with non mummy friends it’s discussing topics they haven’t given headspace to for years and the child needs are always a priority so they won’t listen to anything you say or will provide limited responses.
it’s worked for me to completely sack off my friends who are parents for about 5 years minimum. As PPs have said they are too busy and have other friends who are more in their wavelength so expect little and hope to be pleasantly surprised.