Friends w/ Children Don't Get Babysitters
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So – I don’t think your wrong for wanting childfree events, particularly in your home. It’s your home, you can draw whatever boundaries you want.
But…your friends have kids. They are the kind of people that want to include them in everything, for whatever reason. We have to live in the world as it is, not as we want it to be.
I think you are fully within your rights to tell your friends – so sorry, this is an adults only event you can’t bring junior, BUT prepare for some of them to decline instead of pony up for a sitter. You get to make your choices about what you want to do, but they get to make choices about what they want to do in response. Maybe they won’t come.
Also – how many adult get togethers are you trying to plan? Are they ALL adults only, or just a special occasion now and again. Relationships are about compromising. If your friends have kids, you kind of have to meet them in the middle and have more kid friendly events some of the time, if you want to see them regularly. Not for your birthday necessarily, but some of the time you have to maybe do something they’re more into than what your into.
Or you can just find more dinks to be friends with. Maybe your lifestyles don’t mesh anymore, that’s okay.
At the end of the day – it’s rude for them to drag along their kids after they’ve been told no, but you have to acknowledge these friends have kids and the kids are part of the package. If you want to see these friends, you have to at least on occasion accommodate the kids.
Thank you all for the replies. Unfortunately, our home is small and we just cannot accommodate adults AND their children in the same space and feel relaxed to enjoy the party and company. We’ve had children going into closed off rooms and making a mess of things while their parents think it’s adorable and do not discipline them for disrespecting our home and boundaries. Going out to dinner with this group of friends is also difficult; oftentimes many of the couples express not being able to come out because of their children’s behaviors or financial difficulty in affording a meal out for the entire family. Home get togethers are much easier for the group as a whole since their homes are kid-friendly and generally everyone brings over food and treats for these get togethers. My husband spend a lot of our time with our friends and their children and we have often performed chores for them around their homes, changed diapers, brought dinner over so they aren’t cooking, put kids to bed and have tried to be as accommodating to their needs as possible. Maybe this was more of a rant than seeking advice since all of my close girlfriends at this point have children and I do not. I guess I’m just taken aback by the lack of not even trying to respect our desires here to have a child-free event for the evening.
Also, I try to plan maybe 3-4 events through the entire year where it’s kid-free and more than half of those kid-free events turn into the husbands going out for drinks/dinner while the wives stay home with the kids and vice versa. So the adult group as a whole maybe gets together for one night of the year where its kid-free. Ninety-five percent of the time we spend with our friends, they always have their children with them.
Priorities change. I mean, they have kids. Things change when you have a family.
If you want these friends to celebrate with you, make it easy for them.
Given your updates, I feel much more certain of my previous answer. I bet your friends could find a sitter if they really wanted to go to your party. I’m sure they have occasional moments without their children. (Maybe you babysit then, lol.) But your party is not a priority to them, and sadly EVERYONE would rather not go than find a babysitter (or a family member, or another friend). They have that right. But maybe it’s time to find some new friends…
I don’t know how old you are but 3-4 child free events a year sounds like a lot to me. People are busy and money is tight. I don’t have kids but if I did, nights away from them would be precious enough that I would probably allocate 1-2 a year for friends and the rest for solo time with my husband. Priorities change. I think you need to adjust your expectations and proceed accordingly.
It sounds like your friends will probably not come if they have to hire a sitter. You could go out with your husband and celebrate your birthday.
Kids are labor intensive and expensive. Many people don’t have the money to afford a sitter on top of all the other costs that come with attending a party. It’s also hard to find a sitter. I don’t know a single teen who babysits and I have a teenage daughter and know a large number of teen girls. They get regular jobs at places like restaurants and they have lots of activities. They don’t do babysitting. Daycare centers close for the evening so the kids can’t go there. If you have no relatives in the area who are willing to watch the kids you end up unable to find anyone. There is also the fact that if your kids spend the day in daycare you want to see them and spend time with them and don’t want to dump them with a sitter, if you can even find a sitter.
You are asking your friends to choose between spending time with you and spending time with their kids. They are only willing to see you if they can do both. You may need to find different friends or give them some time until their kids are older. Those kids will hit an age when they don’t want to go with their parents and they will be old enough to stay home without supervision and the adults will start going out without them. Until that time these friends come with kids. It’s their fact of life. They are probably just as tired of your invitations saying their kids aren’t invited as you are of them bringing their kids along.
Yeah I agree.
I’m sorry, I know this sucks and probably really hurts, but your friends lives have shifted and your just not on the same page with them anymore.
Kids are front and center for them. Whether they could do things to accommodate and prioritize your party and adult time, they don’t want to.
If you want to be friends with them, these are the parameters they are willing to meet you on now.
Thank you all for the replies. My husband and I are in our mid-30s and have chosen not to have children. In re-reading what I have written, this affirms for me why we’ve chosen not to have kids. I guess I was wrong to feel like for the amount of time, money and effort we make into visiting these friends every other weekend at their homes, attending all of their children’s birthday parties and most of their children’s sporting events in an effort to keep our friendships going and to support them that an evening away or respecting our wishes to not have their children in our home could have been returned.
It would probably be best to pull back from these friendships, honestly. You feel used, and maybe your friends like seeing you when it’s convenient for them, but they also probably won’t miss you much if you’re not at all those sporting events, for example. You don’t have to go every other weekend, either.
Meet up groups are great for finding other childless adults with similar interests.
Girl I feel you. I don’t have kids and don’t think I will, and one thing you don’t realize about staying child free is that many of your friends won’t, do the child bearing years inpact your life even if you don’t have any of your owns.
Still – don’t feel resentful here. You made a choice, they made a choice. It was different, but it’s something everybody is entitled to do.
You also chose to put in a lot of effort to maintain the friendships and seem to resent they haven’t returned the favor.
But that’s not the right way to look at it. First of all, you aren’t owed the return. You have the right to put in as much or as little effort as you want, as are they.
Furthermore, while you’ve put in a lot of time meeting them where they are at, expecting them to put in the same amount of effort is much harder on their end to meet you were they are at. They have more time pressures, more financial pressures, etc.
I’m not saying their time is more valuable or they are spending it on something more noble, but come on, kids take time and money. We know that, that’s a big reason we’re not having them.
So it is much easier for you to come to them then it is for them to come to you. It just is. It won’t always be that way forever, so if you want to keep those friendships going maybe commit to a couple of years of giving more than you get until they have more freedom
Or move on and find other people who are at the same place in live as you are. That’s totally valid.
I think something else that I’m not sure if other people touched on as much is that I think that you guys are sort of making it worse by aiming to have the entire group meet up. I don’t mean that as a dig because I love having all my friends together, especially for a celebration. But it’s hard enough to get 6 child-free couples together as it is. I think that most people don’t have that large of a friend group to where they are inviting them all to their home at the same time, because I think that even child-free friend groups would probably have similar complaints that they can’t find a time when everyone is free or people double book themselves or whatever. I think the only reason you don’t have people bailing or making plans on top of your party is that parents don’t often have as many social obligations anyway, so probably no one else is inviting them out on those days.
Anyway, my point is that I think that this situation doesn’t necessarily have to come down to whether you and your friends are compatible anymore or whether they care about you or not. But I think that you guys have very high expectations that are sort of destined to not be met. I try to schedule time with two of my friends (one lives near me and one lives an hour away), and even though we only make plans 3 times a year, it takes weeks and weeks of planning to find a weekend where we are all free (and nobody has kids!)
I think finding child free friends will help, but I think if you just sort of accept that the group is not going to hang out together, you may still be able to enjoy spending time with smaller subsets of the group without feeling like they don’t value you.
