Mixing Friends With Babies

Before you have children, you can’t imagine that it will change your relationships with your friends – but it does, and staying in touch with child-free friends takes a little more effort once Junior arrives.

- Julia Boltt

1 ACCEPT THAT THINGS WILL CHANGE

When a baby arrives, your life will change, no matter what you promised yourself beforehand. You’re sleep deprived, and your headspace often doesn’t really allow the same room for your friends that it did BC (that’s ”before children”). You also have far less time than you did previously.

“Once you have a child, your priorities shift, and the way that you think about the world changes. You more than likely won’t think about your friends as much. What can become problematic is that the friend sometimes struggles to understand the shift in priorities and can find it hard to understand the lack of effort that’s being put into the friendship if they don’t have children themselves,” says Jeanine Lamusse, a clinical psychologist based in Randburg in the Johannesburg area.

However hard it seems when you’re tired, busy and preoccupied, it’s important to make space and time for your friendships, Jeanine advises. “Are you still taking care of yourself in other ways, that you have other life experiences, so that you can still connect with your friends? So often, with your priorities shifting, all you end up talking about is baby-baby-baby, but obviously your friend can’t relate to that,” she says. If you’re taking care of yourself in a multidimensional way as much as possible, particularly when you’re through those gruelling first few months of newborn parenting, that gives those friendships a lot more room to grow.

2 TALK ABOUT IT