How Friendships Change When You Become a Dad

So you think your relationships won’t change after having kids? Think again. Here’s how your relationships may change with your partner, friends, and family when you become a father, and what you can do about it.

Considering how small and helpless babies are, it’s sometimes surprising just how much of an impact they can have on the lives of the adults around them. Just think, for example, about how different things are for you now compared to your pre-fatherhood life.

Babies create new relationships in people’s lives simply by being born: You and your partner have gone from being children to being parents, your parents are now grandparents, your brothers and sisters are uncles and aunts, and so on. And naturally, those relationships (as well as the rights and responsibilities that go with them) will take some getting used to.

But perhaps babies’ greatest power is their ability to profoundly change relationships that had existed long before they were born. They can reunite families and mend old wounds, or they can open new ones. They can even change the nature of your friendships. Here are a few ways this might play out.

Your Changing Relationship with Your Partner

A lot of couples imagine that having and raising children together will make their relationship stronger, and a lot of times they’re right—especially if the pregnancy was planned, the baby was conceived through ‘artificial’ means (insemination, donor sperm, donor eggs, or surrogacy), or the child was adopted. But as we’ve discussed, having a baby creates all sorts of challenges: sleep deprivation, little or no sex, less money, less free time, more work and responsibility, and so on. As researcher Jay Belsky puts it, in the early stages of parenthood a new baby “tends to push his mother and father apart by revealing the hidden and half-hidden differences in their relationship.”

Let’s spend a little time now, though, focusing on some of the very positive ways the baby can affect your life and your relationship with your partner.

The support you gave your partner during the pregnancy and birth—and seeing what an amazing dad you are—may make her fall in love with you all over again.
You may feel a sense of gratitude to the baby for enabling you to feel what it’s like to be loved and to love more deeply than you ever have before.
The baby may give you and your partner a sense of tremendous pride at having jointly created something absolutely amazing.
You’re probably pretty proud of yourself right now—and you should be. You’re confident in your own abilities and you’ve experienced how incredible it is to be loved and needed by a little creature who wants nothing more in life than to be with you (her teddy bear is a close second). That makes you love her even more. And the love you have for your baby can make you love the one who helped make that baby possible even more.
Having faced, worked through, and overcome the challenges of the first year of parenthood may make you and your partner feel more deeply committed to your relationship and to making it work. You now also have someone to whom you may pass along new and old family traditions.

The Impact of Parenthood on Friendships

You may not realize it at first, but you and your partner will gradually find that your relationships with friends and other non-immediate family members have changed.

You may be interested (or at least more interested than you were before becoming a parent) in getting together with relatives your own age, especially those with kids, so that the next generation can get to know their cousins.
Similarly, your circle of close friends will gradually change to include more couples, especially couples with kids.
You and your partner aren’t going to be nearly as available for last-minute movies or double dates, and you might not be quite as happy to have friends drop by unannounced.
Your new, less spontaneous lifestyle may affect your relationships with your single male friends most of all. Having a new baby probably means fewer all-night poker games. Your buddies may stop calling you because they think you’re too busy or not interested in hanging out with them anymore. Or you might stop calling them because seeing their relatively carefree and obligation-free lives may make you jealous or depress the hell out of you.
While your child is young, she’ll be happy to play with whomever you introduce her to, and her first friends are most likely going to be your friends’ kids. But as she gets older and starts showing an interest in other children and making friends of her own, she’ll take on a more active role on the family social committee. And all of a sudden you’ll find yourself socializing with her friends’ parents.
Relationships between you and other adults may continue longer than they otherwise might because the kids like playing together.
Relationships can be subtly—or not so subtly—affected by competition. Let’s face it: We all want our children to be the biggest, smartest, fastest, cutest, and funniest, and it’s only natural (especially for guys) to get a little competitive.
Friends or relatives with children who are older than yours might start getting on your nerves by insisting on telling you every single thing they think you’re doing wrong as a parent.
As with your parents and in-laws, some friends or relatives may be disdainful or unsupportive of your taking an active, involved role in your baby’s life, falling back on the old stereotype that men should leave the parenting stuff up to their wives or that putting your family first could have a negative impact on your career.

Playdates for Grown-Ups!

Did your social life take a nosedive once you had kids? Join the club. FriendsForParents.com is here to help. Offering customized matches based on criteria such as common interests and political viewpoints, the site just might be the lifeline you need.

Smoothing Your Path

Here are a few things you can do to smooth out some of the bumps in your changing relationships with friends and family:

Watch what you say. No matter how much people without kids pretend, there’s a limit to how much they really want to hear about all the exciting things (to you, anyway) that your baby can do or how many times she filled her diaper today.

Learn to accept change. It may seem harsh, but the fact is that you may lose some friends (and they’ll lose you) now that you’re a parent. But you’ll gain plenty of new ones in the process.

Don’t listen to everything everyone else tells you. Whatever they know about taking care of children they learned on the job. And that’s how you’re learning too.

Watch the competition. If your friend’s baby crawls, walks, talks, sings, says “dada,” or gets a modeling contract or an early-admissions preschool acceptance letter before your baby does, you may find yourself more than a little envious. But you know that your baby is the best one in the world. Go ahead and let them delude themselves into thinking that theirs is. Why burst their bubble?

The above is excerpted from The New Father: A Dad’s Guide to the First Year by Armin A. Brott; all materials courtesy of Abbeville Press.