<p>Are you close friends with the parents of your kids’ friends? How do you maintain those friendships? I mean real genuine friendship, not just being nice and friendly on the outside. It seems to be really hard when the parents are driven by the succes of their children. They constantly compare the kids by the grades they get, activities they are involved in, college goals the parents have, … Lists can go on and on…</p>
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<p>Not all parents are like this.</p>
<p>In addition to many acquaintances, I have several close friends I met through my children. I have never compared my kids with theirs or anyone else’s, nor have they. We support each other through life, and we have so much in common simply due to the fact that our kids are experiencing similar things. My closest of these friends are those I met because of my oldest — it so happens that all of us has an oldest child going off to school this fall. I look forward to having great conversations about what is going on with them … and with us … when they leave. We won’t be waiting to see who does best or who can’t handle it … we’ll be there to offer advice, congratulations, a shoulder to cry on, etc. Just because we are grown ups doesn’t mean we’ve forgotten what it means to be a friend! :)</p>
<p>I have many friends who are the parents of h.s. and college aged children, but they don’t happen to be the same friends of my own kids. That could be because we’ve had to move a lot for my H’s career, so can’t stay with the same group they started out with. Every time we move, they have to make all new friends, and so do we. We support each other in that process, actually, and encourage each other to invite someone to the house or try a movie together, just to deepen a brand new acquaintance into a friendship. I’m not in competition with any of the parents over our children, because they are different circles than my kids. Sometimes even within the same high school, even…we just have different tastes and reasons to befriend people.
I like all of my kids’ friends and their girlfriends/boyfriends, but actually those parents aren’t my favorite folks. Too bad. They are kind of occupied with their own lives already and we are always the newcomers in town. Oh well.</p>
<p>Two of my best friends are the parents of my children’s friends. In one friendship, we compare children–only to say: “Can you believe what my knucklehead did now??” </p>
<p>One of these friends has academic superstar children. She tends to go on and on about the accomplishments of her children–asking me about mine on my way out the door.</p>
<p>I am so glad to read your posts. Great for you and your friends. I have met some moms through my kids school. Over the years we became good friends. It seems to become more of the competitions among moms as the kids get older and head toward colleges soon. I believe each of us is unique just like our kids. For some it seems to be hard to accept that. I do want to be good friends with them without all these competitive things, but they are so eager to know what my kids are doing during this summer. They keep asking even a few months before the summer starts and even now. I start wondering what this friendship is really about. I am taking a good look at where we are heading as friends.</p>
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An especially sophisticated variation on this: a friend who does ask how your children are doing, but only because she knows you’ll then ask about hers, at which point the entire conversation becomes about their plans/accomplishments/travails. :D</p>
<p>Some friendships are mutual and genuinely supportive - others are more matters of convenience or proximity. I think that friends freely share both ups and downs. A true friend can’t wait to congratulate you, with all her heart, for your children’s good fortune, and she’s happy to hold your hand when your kids are having a rough patch, without gloating or gossip. And, of course, you do the same for her! Having kids in the same class or EC isn’t enough to create a genuine friendship, though it can be a starting point.</p>
<p>“Friends” who only want to brag on their own children, or monopolize the conversation with their accomplishments or travails, are not actually friends, IMO.</p>
<p>True friends should celebrate all of these ups and downs, with mutual sharing and reciprocity. When it is one-sided, I don’t consider that much of an interesting or fulfilling relationship.</p>
<p>We have a number of friends who are parents of our kids’ friends. In some cases, we knew the parents BEFORE we had kids. In other cases, we met the parents when our kids participated in activities. It’s amazing how much you get to know someone when you carpool with their kids for TEN (no kidding…one activity was that long and we are happy to say we also met some fine friends) years. The dinners we had when we were in the carpool have evolved into a regularly scheduled “couples night out” now that we are all empty nesters.</p>
<p>““Friends” who only want to brag on their own children, or monopolize the conversation with their accomplishments or travails, are not actually friends,”</p>
<p>I agree.</p>
<p>I’m close to two parents of kids in my older son’s class. Her son like mine was in the top 1% of the class. My feeling is that my son might be a little brighter, but her son worked harder and cared more about grades. My kid was into computers, hers played the violin. They both did well at Science Olympiad. They both got into Ivy’s. We have a lot of other common interests outside the kids - gardening, yoga, poetry, painting among others. </p>
<p>My other good friend has kids with more issues. The kids used to be friends, but have drifted apart. Our friendship dates back to doing Reading is Fundamental together and being co-presidents of the PTA. We talk about kids books and gardening, dealing with elderly parents and now her new job teaching elementary school. We also talked about the school and teachers, but more in the abstract - how to deal with problems, insights on teachers or counselors as opposed to boasting about kids.</p>
<p>My bestest friend has a son my son’s age, and they are bestest friends too. We have never been in competition…our discussions about our kids revolve around more “relationship” oriented themes. How we are getting along with each other, whether things around the house are going smoothly, the little bumps and bruises you get living in a family…</p>
<p>Over the years in sports, we’ve befriended many people, but for the most part those friendships revolve around the common interest and don’t outlast the end of the season. Plus half the time, you find out those people have been stabbing your son in the back to get their own son a better place on the team. :(</p>
<p>My parents never usually interact with any of my or my sister’s friends’ parents, but my sister’s best friend’s parents are two of their closest friends (certainly their closest friends in Washington when we lived there, which we did until a month ago). We lived a block apart for six years, and my sister and their daughter (now high school sophomores) went to elementary school together but attended separate middle and high schools. </p>
<p>There’s never been any sense of competition between their daughter and my sister; it’s a genuine friendship, reinforced by common interests and the fact that we’re two of very few immigrant families in our neighborhood (we’re Swedish and they’re Iranian and Taiwanese, though they’ve lived in the United States for decades longer than we have). To me, they’re like a second set of parents; I’ll definitely miss them when I’m in college.</p>
<p>Having lived so many places (and so long 
), I have a number of different “best friends.” In the town where we live now (and for all of DS k-12 schooling), our best friends are the parents of his best friend.</p>
<p>Mostly our kid comparisons mirror cheers’ “my kid out-knuckleheaded” your kid type. </p>
<p>As our kids advanced into late middle school, and definitely into high school, it became clear that their talents were very, very different. Neither of our boys was the Superstar in any category. Theirs was athletically talented and the type of kid who was the nexus of their friendship group socially. He struggled academically and headed off to our 3rd (4th?) tier in state U. Ours was athletically active but a bench-warmer, musically talented and academically strong. In a “top” University.</p>
<p>Good friends can share each others thrills and joys over their kids’ successes without lording it over each other. Good friends are comfortable sharing and supporting each other in their real disappointments and worries (along with enjoying the endlessing amusing knucklehead stories). </p>
<p>And… it’s interesting. My kid is at a very very tough no-grade-inflation school in a tough major. He who never struggled academically has now experienced in a class or two the type of struggles that were day-in day-out, year-in year-out struggles for her kid. I think it was a comfort for her to hear that my kid could have the same experiences; I know it was helpful to me to share the parental perspective on watching my kid navigate this with someone who understood maybe more about it than I do.</p>
<p>Real friends.</p>
<p>That does not fit with the behavior the OP describes, I think. At least if the parents have any level of wisdom and maturity. Being “driven” by the kid’s success is probably the root problem. Still, even those of us not driven by that can experience pre-occupation with the college search et al. The key is sharing vs. boasting.</p>
<p>My wife has recently had the kind of experience the OP described. The mom of one of our daughter’s teammates (from age 12) and my wife had become close friends over the years, as a lot of the players’ mom’s had - it was a very friendly and social group. But during the past year the other mom had taken to dropping casual negative comments about our daughter - her social activities, other friends, etc. - into her conversations with my wife. It made my wife uncomfortable and was a bigger problem because this mom was particularly clueless about her own daughter’s occasionally poor personal choices, to the point where she was critically comparing other girls to her own daughter based on assumptions about her daughter which were <cough> unwarranted. (The daughter is a perfectly lovely, but normal, i.e. not saintly, high school girl.)</cough></p>
<p>The two moms began to drift apart, a process which accelerated when, after the other mom had gone on and on about the more rigorous curriculum at the private college prep school her daughter attended, and months of pricey college admissions advising and weekly test prep, the ACT results came out, and our (public schooled, un-prepped) daughter got a score which was significantly higher than her daughter’s. Explanation? Her daughter’s calculator broke. Then they took the test again - and the gap widened. </p>
<p>At least they don’t talk about academic rigor anymore. And the girls are still friends.</p>
<p>Grantedin, it can be more difficult to find real friends in our adult years. While I am pleased to be able to consider the parents of some of my kids’ friends as “good friends,” I confess that I don’t feel as “intimate” with them as I do with friends from my younger days. I rarely see my best-friend-since-college, who is currently living in China … but I feel a bond with her that I don’t feel with my closest adult-years friend. That bond was built from shared experiences that helped to define us … it’s just really different & special. I do know people who have developed strong emotional bonds in their adult years, though, so it certainly does happen.</p>
<p>The parents you describe exist everywhere. Let 'em be friends with each other! I second the notion that they don’t sound like “friends” I would want.</p>
<p>Thank you all for sharing your experiences and wisdom. I have a good friend whose son is same age as mine. They go to same school since kindergarten. We have established friendship based on common interest, not based on what our boys do and how they do. Some of my other friends seem to be obsessed with the successes of their kids. I have seen them suffer miserably because their sense of worth depended on their kids’ accomplishments.</p>
<p>good story, kluge. We had one mom here who exhibited similar behaviour with her son the future “theater star.” He was apparently so good, he was too good to appear in any of his own HS productions. I still have not figured that one out. </p>
<p>We made some lifelong friends when our eldest was in kindergarten and a group of us had kids the same age–5 and 3. Must have been something in the water that year, but it was fun to see all the kids–and their little sibs–as they went through the same stages & milestones over the years. I sort of felt bad that our child #3 didn’t have the same peer group cause our friends didn’t keep having them at the same rate we did! </p>
<p>We have had some pretty good friendships with our HS kids’ friends’ parents, based on our kids somehow doing 90% of the same things together, but they have never been as strong as the original ones formed 20 (yikes!) years ago.</p>
<p>And we quickly learned to avoid the people that obviously were in it for the ego trip of comparing their child to ours. The older I get the more I appreciate kids who are just “good kids”–much rather see the world populated by them than by kids who are brilliant but…not so nice.</p>
<p>Believe me, I am the queen of chucking out time-wasting friends. In the case of that one friend, I keep thinking her need to get stroked will subside as her children go from peak to peak. Hasn’t happened yet but i have hope. I have learned a ton from her on other matters so the friendship remains on my books.</p>
<p>Even on CC, we see so many posters approval seeking–not learning or sharing. </p>
<p>I confess, I’m missing that ‘approval’ chip. I tossed it at age 5 when it wasn’t working out for me in kindergarten, haha. Besides, I have a healthy suspicion of ‘superstar’ children and I never steered mine in that direction.</p>
<p>I grew up with an academic superstar–the brilliant multi-talented one the adults fawned over, ad nauseum. Guess what? He married the wrong woman and his adult life has been a nightmare. Whoops. There goes all that potential. Out the uncontrollable window.</p>
<p>Also, I have a healthy suspicion of parents who think their children are ‘saintly’. Maybe it’s because ‘saintly’ was lorded over me as a child–in and out of school. Maybe it’s because I realized I wasn’t ‘saintly’ as a child. Maybe it’s because when I was a small child, I realized ‘saintly’ isn’t even attainable. Sorry to disappoint Jesus, Sister, but there ya have it. (At which point cheers went out into the corridor for the rest of the day). Also, I have had many many children in my life. They ain’t saintly. If anything, their society is more brutal than adult society.</p>
<p>So yeah–my preference is to hang out with parents of knuckleheads-- in Sinner’s Alley and in real life.</p>
<p>But I can give needed approval if a friend needs it. Not bothered, as they say in the UK.</p>
<p>I have a friend who literally has everything except the academic excellece her kids lack. It nearly drives her crazy and miserable. She also makes her kids feel very inadequate. I did talk to her that it isn’t going to be as important as she think it is in the end. How do you define the success of a person? We will not know until the day comes to depart the earth. Even then it is in the person’s heart, not what others see.</p>