Are you still friends with your NCT group?

[Yellowwellies1]

And how long has it been?

My group are still in regular contact 18 months in, but I'm still sceptical we'll all become best friends for life. Maybe I have unrealistic expectations!

Yes. But we are all pretty close tbh. And I know we would all help each other in a flash if we needed it.

Yes what on earth could you have in common with a group of women going through the same enormous life upheaval of a first child at the same time…

7 years in here, our WhatsApp group stays strong with 8 of our 9 still in touch at least monthly. I know there are a couple of individual good friendships, as a group we get together about twice a year now. I’m not specifically close friends with any of them, but I was in a bind or needed a shoulder to cry on I’d message them without hesitation.

I'm not in touch really at all with either my postnatal group from DS1 or my antenatal group from DS2. I think a couple might still be FB friends from the second group. Neither group was in my area.

However, I am in touch (mostly FB) with the two women who organised local coffee mornings in my area when my kids were babies. The first has moved to the Midlands. The other still lives locally, and she and I were both involved in setting up a breakaway NCT branch after DS2 was born, because the boroughwide branch mostly organised activities in the west of the borough and didn't come to our (much less affluent) area much. I wasn't sure about starting a new branch when the idea was first mooted, and was convinced, most, by the antipathy and outright nastiness/snobbery (and possibly some racism towards one of our group). Worst, a lot of the nastiness came from two NCT postnatal tutors, including the one who had run my course, and I felt that was very unprofessional and disappointing - it seemed to bring out a side to her I'd not seen before and wished I hadn't.

I had gone back to work by the time we set our own branch up so I mostly saw people at some of the initial meetings or through the book group we had for a couple of years after that.

DS2 is nearly 15 and we set up our breakaway over 14 years ago. I've lost touch with some people, and quite a lot of people have moved out of London, including women who returned to Ireland and Australia. Very sadly, one of our founding members lost her daughter aged 12, and one woman who I met through NCT was perhaps most in touch with still out of the group died. Though I don't meet up with others, I do have some contact with a few on FB or run into those who still live locally occasionally. And occasionally I've met someone through something unrelated who has benefited from our efforts to set up a more local group - I believe it's still going.

I didn’t have a NCT group but a council run post natal group. Whilst we don’t meet up, I’m still in contact via Facebook etc…. It’s been 19yrs !!

I really enjoyed hanging out with the NCT group. But I was the only one who went back to work FT and they chose to always meet up during the week when I was at work and after a while they became less interested in meeting up at the weekend or evening. They also all had second kids around the same time so overlapped on mat leave again and that was game over for my involvement unfortunately.

I signed up, but DS was born prem before the first session. I made it to the last session but none of the pre-labour socials so never bonded with anyone. We were just at such different stages at every point. Made some friends on the playgroup circuit once things settled down. But I still resent having paid what was an awful lot of money to us at the time. I left the chat group as it left me feeling really low seeing what “normal” babies were up to at each stage. It was an isolating time and the course leader was frankly a sneery, shitty human being.

Just over a year later and no. I pulled away quite early because I didn't click with anyone and then I went back to work.

Massive waste of money.

30 years on. We didn't do classes together, but we were very lucky as a "local" group. Quite a range of incomes, but a lot of cheery and sensible support. Slightly weird that our children are now older than we were!

A few, yes. Some of us who lived very close to each other socialised outside the group as families. It's mostly via Facebook now as we have all scattered to the four winds but we try to gather every few years. 'Kids' are 19.

Yes a few.. 36 years on!

There were 6 of us in a post natal group. One became my best friend- we met in 1997!! I'm not in touch with the others although I was for the first few years.

16 years although it’s difficult for us to get together due to work/family.

There were 12 in our group, and I still regularly catch up with 2 of them 8 years later.
It was fairly obvious early on which ones I would or wouldn't gel with - but as I tell friends who are debating doing any type of antenatal class, just making 1 new friend will make it worth it when you're in the throes of newborn life.

Our children are 2.25 years old and we're all still friends. Until the one year mark, we met up weekly for brunch and also did some classes or play dates with the babies. After a year, it went to constant chat but meeting up a few times a month. For the past six months, half of us have been heavily pregnant or have young second babies so the play dates and chat have dropped off a bit.

I'm hoping once the second babies get a bit older, things will pick back up. I was so grateful for my NCT group, they really made my maternity leave amazing so I'd love to stay in touch with them for years to come.

Yes 4 of us are close 3 years on. 2 of us are on mat leave at exactly the same time again!

Yes I am closer to one than the other two.

This is also considering we didn’t even have our NCT classes in person. They were online during lockdown, we kept in touch via whatsapp group and then met uo when we could.

They have saved my sanity.

There were only 5 of us, we're all still very good friends, I'm possibly slightly closer to 2 of them but not much in it. We meet as a group a few times a year, and have the occasional weekend away together. I wouldn't be without them. Our babies turn 18 this year.

One or two people. 15 years on.

No, my group was a disaster for me socially- everyone else was anti any intervention during birth (evangelically so) - c section was seen as abuse- whilst I was strongly in the pragmatic ‘whatever it takes to have a healthy baby alive at the end of it’ mindset, which seemed to make me a leper from the outset.

Through random circumstance I ended up being the only one who had a ‘natural’ birth, and at the first post birth meeting there were lots of snide comments around this. I wasn’t invited to any of the subsequent meet ups, and remember feeling very upset and like I was back at school at the time. Then I cracked on and found some friends independently.

Other friends had amazing nct experiences though and made lifelong friends… it’s possible the others in my group thought it was fabulous too

We all stopped contact when our little one's were about 5 weeks old 🤣😆

Half of us kept in touch pretty much until the DC started primary school. That was it really but now one is DS's maths teacher at high school which is a nice connection. I still think of them but life got in the way - emigration, divorces, etc - and I guess all we had in common was having had sex at the same time.

No.

My husband was in Afghanistan and I only went to the first.

They had the news on in the waiting room and it was explaining yet more soldiers had died.

I naively thought a couple of women would be alone / with a friend / their mum but out of probably 12 couples I was the only one without the father there.

I couldn't go back.

There were 10 of us originally and we saw each other weekly for about a year.
After we went back to work it became school holidays only and some started to drift.
I'm still in regular contact with two and we meet up every school holiday, or sometimes of an evening.
It was 19 years ago we had our first children.

Nope. There is 1 I see and speak to but that’s because our children are in the same Cubs group. I found it hard to gel with them as I was 19/20 (but much older mentally) and they were all late 30s/early 40s. I am friends with another one on Facebook but we don’t meet up or even chat online.

No not really. One lives locally still and we have a chat if we bump into each other. Most people scattered though and moved away. I went back to work when DC was 7 months so didn't have a lot in common with those who didn't. I think we met up sporadically until the kids were about 2. Otherwise, just socials.

Everyone was very nice and it was good while it lasted. I'm glad I did it as was the first of my immediate circle to have a baby and it was nice having people to hang out with.

Yep- still regularly meet up.
I'm very glad I met them!