How do I ask a friend to stop sending baby photos?

[Onesidedfriendship]

I have been friends with someone for around 20 years, we are the same age but I had my children a little earlier so mine are now almost teens. Friend has recently had first child. We have always got along really well and her and her husband are very close to my children but I always remained quite respectful of the relationship and continued to talk about other things, went out without children for meals, spa days etc. I would occasionally send photos (if a big event at school or if child was wearing/using a gift they had bought) but again didn’t overload with pictures of kids. Now friend has had child the relationship has totally changed, she only messages me if it’s something related to the child or spam me with pictures. Can be up to 10 pictures a day on some days. If I message her about something else, she will reply but then will turn the conversation back to the baby and send more photos. I’m just finding it all a bit exhausting. Additionally, I had very bad feeding journeys with my children and didn’t breastfeed either which I always found quite upsetting. I have no problem with breastfeeding/bottle feeding and have always remained mute on the topic with other family/friends as quite frankly it is none of my business! But now this friend has also taken to sending me quite graphic photos of her breastfeeding her baby and I’ve just hit my threshold limit, it’s dragging up old triggers and quite frankly want it to stop. I’ve tried the ignore tactic or change the subject but she continues to do it. I have to tell her as it’s really affecting our friendship but don’t quote know how to do it. Am I being unreasonable for wanting friendship to go back to the way it was or at the very least stop the graphic photos?!

I had a friend like this. When I had dcs I barely mentioned them and continued our friendship as per pre-kids. In fact I was hurt when I asked her to be godmother and she refused as she didn’t want any involvement with any children, but there you go.

Fast forward ten years and friend has a baby. Omg. Just omg. No one had ever been pregnant or had a baby before her. And certainly no one ever loved their child so much. Thousands of photos (including of birth!) and she would not be parted from child even when they were four years old, with various comments about she and child being “really close” with implication I just left mine by the side of the road.

After four years old? Well, who knows because I drifted off.

Get a puppy and spam the fuck out of her phone

She may be one one of Those Mums. An utter bore about their kids. For some its a phase for others it never ends. My parents have friends who are like this about their daughter and she is now 50 🙈🙈!

If the baby is only 8 months then I would leave things a bit longer before saying something. When I was on maternity leave I felt very boring because literally all I did was look after the baby so I had nothing else to talk about! It was an insecurity of mine and made me feel like a bad friend. Hopefully once your friend returns to with she will start to find her old self again, and perhaps you can gently ask her about her sense of identity post-baby to test how any comments from you would be received.

Tell her you have a new phone number & give her mine! I'll happily be 'spammed' with cute baby photos!

She’s just had her first baby give her a break.

You had yours a long time ago so you probably don’t remember how you may have also been in the new baby bubble and it may have been all you talked about.

You need to give her some time to adjust to being a mum and finding her new self. She’s not going to be able to go out for solo dinners with you or spa days which isn’t her fault so just support her in this place she’s in and be more patient.

I don’t have to imagine very hard.

People have busy lives and can’t be expected to respond ten times a day to a photo. I’ve got a thousand photos of my kids, send me your number and I’ll send you ten a day to react to. 👀

You don't need to ask her to stop

1. Make sure you alter settings so the pics aren't saved to your camera roll
2. Mute chat
3. Check it every other day, don't bother to look at photos, send reply saying "lovely" with a heart
4. Jobs a goodun

Afraid I would call her out on it.
Change the record please. I don’t need to see pictures of your child! With a yawn 🥱 emoji

😂That sounds insufferable, especially the 'close' comments like no one else feels like that about their child.

Someone else had a good line here about you no longer being a friend, but an audience member. Let's hope this is a phase OP's friend grows out of.

Try and get in the habit of only opening her messages and responding late in the evening, ooh! lovely photo's of baby today xx
If she mentions it, just say life's busy at the moment and it's the only time you get to chill out on your phone, plus your dh got a bit of a shock when you opened a message the other day & he inadvertently saw her boob pic.

There's a field full of cows graphically breastfeeding their calves outside my window a few weeks back. Shocking!

Thank you @mrsbowes and @babyproblems , maybe I will cut it down a bit 🤣. My sister in law asks regularly, so I know she's happy to get them, and my sister, but maybe I'll send fewer pictures to friends 🙈🙈

I'd just not look and reply with 'aww cute' or something sometimes. But often I'd just ignore them if they're coming at a rate of dozens a day.

I think I'd feel too bad actively telling them I have no interest in their baby. It's easy enough to just ignore them really.

And just don't really talk about that and change the subject if she does when you text.

I do think it's a bit unwise to assume friends who don't have babies currently will be fascinated by that many pics of yours.

Stop replying and mute her.

It sounds like you are in very different places and the friendship has run its course.

I would be irritated if anybody sent me multiple photo messages each day irrespective of the subject.

I bf'd 2 kids for a year and never took a bf pic never mind sent one! Especially not naked from the waist up! Tell her that your DC opened her message and saw her full frontal bf photo so can she stop sending them please.

If it continues I think it's ok to ask her to stop sending bf pics as you were unable to and it's still a challenge for you.

General baby pics otherwise you're going to have to manage!

Well I get what the OP means. Life is busy. WhatsApp groups are busy. Ten photos a day is pretty excessive. My babies are adults now and I am not super interested in other people’s babies. Yes, babies are lovely, but photos of them are always going to be much more interesting to their parents and grandparents than they are to anyone else. A few photos a week would be reasonable for me, but much more than that and I’d become irritated because the other person presumably wants a response and I don’t always have the time or inclination to respond to multiple photos from one person. What if other friends were also sending multiple
photos of their baby? Responding to it all would take up quite a lot of time and get rather boring tiring. I was in a baby bubble myself once, but luckily in those days, although digital photography was a thing, phones didn’t have cameras and you could only send digital photos via email on a laptop, therefore I was able to avoid bombarding people with pictures of my babies and just let them look at the baby with their eyes whenever we met up.

I actually would love it if someone sent me loads of photos of their plants rather than their baby/holiday/dinner 😳.

Can you mute her? She sounds very annoying. I don't want anyone to send me multiple pictures of ANYTHING a day.

Ridiculous people jumped on you for the breastfeeding thing

If you’ve got school aged children, surely you have had to mute a whassap group many a time by now! Do that, and then reply as and when suits you.

You can change your settings so that you don’t store photos received in messages to your camera roll btw.

Yep, that would wind me up. No one cares about your kids except you. I hate when people share pics / videos of kids in group chats too. You know their kids didn't give permission for that. And I'm not comfortable with it at all. Also: it's just boring.

Think I would meet in person and tell her directly that you prefer not to receive pictures of other people's kids unless a special occasion. Make it a general rule you have, not specific to her. And I would tell her about your partner seeing her breastfeeding pic and laugh. If she looks embarrassed, she will never send anything similar again. If she doesn't: then tell her directly you prefer not to receive pics like that as you can't do anything with them. Maybe wrap it up in the info you shared about not being able to breastfeed, for some emotional manipulation, but I don't think that's your main issue (correct me if I'm wrong). It's just weird and inappropriate. Why would you send a mate that?? I wouldn't even send my sister that.

Another suggestion: too many friends sending pics and videos, impacting my storage, gonna need to turn off automatic downloading so I won't see any more pics, I'm afraid. Can't wait to see these on your phone when we meet up!

You could gently mention about the breastfeeding photos and explain that it is triggering for you. That's reasonable.

Otherwise you have to wait for her to get the picture that you aren't that interested. If she sends 10 photos, you don't have to look at them...

I get it's annoying but I'd just delete the ones you have stored and stop them downloading. It's not her fault you've got those default settings.

I can't see any way of raising this without falling out and so on that basis I wouldn't. Friendship just sometimes requires being a bit interested or at least looking it. For example I have a friend that talks about work a lot. I don't especially care but I do care about her so she gets my time.

While it might not be "exhausting", it certainly is boring to have an endless stream of several baby photos every day. I wouldn't even "like" them. I would just ignore them and only respond to something not baby related.