Issue #18: How to support parent friends (if you don’t have kids)

Practical tips for showing up & maintaining your bond.

One of my biggest fears around not having children – at least, not in the near future – is the prospect of falling out of touch with some of my closest friends as they become parents. It’s something that’s been on my mind this year, as six significant people in my life have had, or are about to have, children.

The nature of friendship is to exist alongside one other, not intertwined. It’s likely my friends & I won’t be cohabiting (long-term); coparenting; or indeed copulating, unless things take on a very different tone. There’s freedom in that, of course – it’s no coincidence these are the relationships where I feel the most myself. But, equally, it’s easy to catastrophize that, without those legally-binding ties, we’ll someday come apart, particularly when our life paths go in different directions.

Which is why I was grateful for the example given in this year’s romantic-comedy film, ‘What’s Love Got To Do With It?’, where Lily James plays a childfree*, 30-something woman best known, to her closest friend’s daughters, as ‘Auntie Zoe’. It sounds appealing: Auntie Zoe is there for bedtime stories, cuddles and a glass of red with Mum. And although these scenes form barely a side-plot in the film, they meant a lot to me as a depiction of how to stay present in your parent friends’ lives when you don’t have children of your own.

Because the thing is, parenthood isn’t some hobby my friends are taking up, like improvised comedy or pottery-spinning, where I can just show occasional interest. This is the rest of their lives – and I want to stay a part of that, not in spite of them becoming parents, but in a way that accommodates the change they’re going through. I want the opportunity to be a part of their children’s lives, too (The Conversation has published a helpful piece on what to do (and what not to do) when meeting your friend’s new baby).

* A word on language – the character of Zoe is child-free, which implies an active choice to not be a parent. She does want to have children, declaring during an egg-freezing consultation (another interesting side-plot): ‘Of course I want to be a mum, just not now’, which is defined as delayed parenthood – choosing to have children later than your peers. There’s also childbearing ambivalence, where you feel conflicted about whether you want to have children in the future, and the term childless, which ‘may be considered involuntary’, which presently refers to individual or couples who want kids but struggle with infertility (historically, this might have been used as an umbrella term – but is now generally acknowledged as an important distinction).

I started a discussion around this topic on Twitter – asking plainly what advice people had for maintaining friendships across the parent/non-parent divide.

Francesca Specter @ChezSpecter

For a thing: if you have close friends who have kids but are currently child-free yourself (for whatever reason), what's your best advice for staying involved in parent friends' lives e.g. babysitting, holidays, regular phone check-ins, Sunday lunches?

How to support parent friends when you’re child-free

Having honest conversations

Somewhere in my nightmares, there is a graveyard full of relationships that have withered due to bad communication. Such, I suspect, is the fate of many a friendship – where a small offence or misunderstanding has snowballed into a cataclysmic bulldozer (too many metaphors here, but you get my gist). This can so easily occur in those danger years of diverging life stages, where we lack natural empathy for one another: it’s easy to assume, for instance, your parent friends cancel last minute because they don’t value you, or on the flip side that your childfree friends stop inviting you out because they’ve written you off as a ‘fun friend’.

What struck me, from the answers on Twitter, was how much I wouldn’t have known, had I not put the question out there. For instance, the small detail that new parents might be self-conscious about their usually-pristine homes being untidy – so some reassurance in this area might go down well. I particularly loved this insight:

Rachel Cunliffe @RMCunliffe

@ChezSpecter Offer to come to them (for dinner, or to stay over if they have space) so they don't have to find a babysitter. Bring wine. Let them know you don't care if (that) their place is a mess. Send check-in regular texts while making clear you don't expect instant replies

Friendship can’t survive without honesty. Particularly in a heteronormative world where we feel ourselves divided into tribes: single versus coupled-up people; childfree vs parents. Particularly when we internalise false hierarchies: assuming parents, for instance, are instantly ‘better off’ and don’t need their childfree friends anymore. This assumption compounds loneliness on both sides: parents feel disloyal when complaining about the challenges of raising children, while non-parents might put their parent friends’ lives on a pedestal, or else feel they’re irrelevant to them.

This is one of those dynamics where so-called people-pleasing – not wanting to put people ‘out’, or declare our needs – creates a friendship-threatening information gap. Something that would be sorted with a simple, practical solution (see below tweet, about the difficulty of sitting in a cafe with young children) might be left unaddressed, leading to no coffee date at all.

It’s true that becoming a parent may well shape your friend’s social calendar for a while. But we will only understand if we communicate: regular check-ins, suggestions. Simple questions like:

• What does your average week look like right now?

• When, or how, would you most like to be supported?

(Ideally, there will be honesty, solicited and unsolicited, from the parents, too. Remember: giving those close to you the necessary information to show you love is a love language in and of itself).

For instance, some insights I wouldn’t have anticipated, from parents: