How important are parent friendships by year 9?

[Iturnedmyfaceaway]

I worry a lot about my 14 year old and friendships.

One thing that bugs me is a close friendship between three other mums. Two are the mothers of good friends of DS. The third is the mother (a nice woman herself in many ways ) of a child in the same friendship group who has always been unpleasant to ds. This third child is an only child and I know his mum has always very much “campaigned” for her son. So, for instance, ds will go out for the afternoon and come home saying “the others had to leave early to go to one of X’s parties”. There was a bad incident back in the summer (Instagram) but otherwise ds seems happy.

Am I over-identifying? I’ve always been better at one to one relationships than big friendship groups. Ds had sn when younger too, and I don’t think that protective feeling really leaves you.

If you are asking if it is important to be friends with your dcs' friends, when they are in Yr9, then, it is of no importance.

I rarely met any of my dcs' friends' parents once they went to secondary. Indeed, when they were 21, I found out I'd been to junior school with the mother of one of ds's friends that he had been friends with for 10 years, and I'd never met her.
No need for there to be any relationship between the parents.

Seconding BackforGood. I'd even say there's a strong push for DC14's to find and have friends who their parents don't know and don't know the parents of, to avoid backchannel communication.

I don't know any of my teenage sons' friends' parents well. I would call a few of them acquaintances, and one is a teacher at their school so I have met him at parents' evenings but that is it. Certainly none of them are close friends. I am still friends with some of the parents from primary school even though none of our children are particularly close any more, but they are the people who I discovered that I had things in common with beyond having children in the same class at school. I may have met them through school, but our friendships are now completely independent of our children.
My DH gets on quite well with the Dad of our youngest son's closest friend, but again that is because they have discovered they have shared interests, not because the kids are friends. The mum is pleasant enough and I will sometimes go in for a cup of tea if I am dropping DS off or collecting him, but we don't have anything in common otherwise. I certainly don't feel under any obligation to try to develop anything more than a superficial relationship with this woman because our children have hit it off.
You are of course right that we never stop worrying about her children no matter what age they are, but I do think that you might be somewhat over invested in your son's friendships. I would concentrate on maintaining a hood good relationship with him, to ensure that he continues to come to you if problems do arise. But don't ho looking for problems, and certainly don't feel that you need to make friends with his friends' mothers in order to "campaign" for him like you feel the othervmother does. By year 9 you do need to be loosening the apron strings a little and let him find his own way. That can be hard I know - all of my children have had friendship issues at some point - but if they can figure things out largely independently things tend to be better in the long run. You sound like a very loving mum, but things will probably be better for you as well as your son if you don't put as much pressure on yourself over things like this.

Sorry, loads of weird typos there....might be due to the dose of Night Nurse I've just taken.
Hope it is still intelligible!

These are really helpful answers -thank you xx