Mothers Are More Constrained

In the customary realm of close friendship, we can easily see the impact on friendship patterns of higher commitments to marriage, family, and work. The Northern California Community Study shows that marriage and parenthood constrain friendship patterns of women more than men. Mothers of young children have fewer friends and are especially likely to be socially isolated.^[43] In the last chapter, I summarized the more obvious impediments to sociability for young mothers and cited my respondents' testimony of their felt need for friendship. Here, I look at some subtler ways that responsibility for young children influences patterns in friendship.

Although few best friends met through husbands, many met through children. Best friends with young children were particularly similar in life-cycle stage. When women emphasized common values as an important basis for friendship, childrearing values were those they most often specified. And although closest friends tended to socialize in pairs, those with young children generally conducted their friendships in the presence of children.

Several reasons explain why close friendships so frequently began through children. One is the importance to women of confidantes who share the experience of mothering (see chapter 2). Child-centered activities are excellent places to meet other mothers. Even simpler is the fact that children are participants in friendships. Women visit their friends in the company of children, so meeting friends through children allows women to judge how

these crowded friendships will work out. Sylvia, whose children are all under six, saw this distinction between men's and women's friendships as the fundamental gender difference in friendship. "Men's friendships are men only. They can go out to the club, play cards, whatever. When women go out, they have their kids along. That affects what they do and where they go."

That friendships among best friends are ideally autonomous and dyadic, yet practiced in the company of children, has much effect on friendships. If the children do not get along, there is no peaceful terrain for the friendship. In child-centered contexts, a mother can note how the children fare together and assess the possibilities of peaceful association with another mother. Differing values and styles of childrearing frequently attend these friendships. When mothers talked about "common values" as important bonds among friends, they most frequently stressed childrearing values. Their reasons for this emphasis were largely instrumental, as the following examples should make clear.

Kay and Linda met in a class on child development at the community college. They were attracted to each other's ideas about childrearing. Kay said: "I could see when she answered questions the teacher brought up, that she feels the same way I do about things." Their friendship developed slowly, finally blossoming over a summer of afternoons spent minding the children and talking. According to Kay: "Just last summer we started doing things with the kids, and we got along real well. Sometimes we get them all together outside and just come inside and play cards and talk. We have the same perverse outlook with kids. We joke around about them, just to get through the day." Kay and Linda, along with their youngsters, saw each other nearly every day, even though Linda had a part-time job.

Things just jell when we're together. We can tell each other's kids to "knock it off," or whatever. You know, with some people, anything goes with their kids. Maybe they don't have a bedtime, or maybe they don't have to mind. That just causes dissension with your own kids. With Linda, I'm at ease with her and the kids. We think alike in all the important areas.

Kay had become close to another friend, Trish, before Kay's children were born. Kay perceived Trish as her "absolute opposite" in

every way and, most problematically, in childrearing style. "I don't disapprove that she does things differently. But we can't 'blend' our differences in the house. If she doesn't put her kids to bed at a regular time, that's fine. But she used to come over at my kids' naptime or bedtime and wake up my kids to play with hers. And that used to drive me nuts!" Kay said "used to" because she tried to visit less often with Trish, whom she still listed among those she felt closest to. Kay befriended her "disorganized" friend for years, defending Trish to other friends and to her own disapproving husband. She felt surprised at how "blending" childrearing styles disrupted a rapport that withstood a great deal of personal differences in values and style. "It's hard to explain how important these small differences are. Her kids can walk around the house with a bag of cookies, eating as much as they want. My kids think they've died and gone to heaven. It always causes tension in my stomach. If I try to deal with my kids, they'll be crying. Linda and I don't have any of this."

Kay's relationship with another, newer friend, whom she liked a lot, did not develop very far because of childrearing differences. "We believe in a lot of discipline and they don't. It's funny how little differences add up, though. I can't wait till the kids get older and those things aren't such a problem."

Sylvia pursued her friendship with Pat in spite of considerable childrearing differences mostly, it seems, because their husbands—close business associates—encouraged their connection. Yet Sylvia complained:

I'm often really disappointed when our childrearing differences come up. They're not as strict with their children. For example, our children have to ask before they leave the yard. Last week, [my daughter] Cathy came in crying because Pat's kids left her behind before she could ask permission to go. Then Pat made matters worse by telling her to "shut up."

I felt very angry, but that's the way she raises her kids. It's irritating to her when the kids cry. Whereas her children irritate me when they're outspoken or disrespectful. I just try to rationalize it out so it won't affect the friendship.

But it does affect the friendship. Sylvia frequently noted differences in childrearing values and styles that impeded the development of ease and trust in her friendship with Pat.

Mothers are constrained in their friendship choices in many ways. It is not just that primary responsibilities for home and children—and, job responsibilities as well—leave little time and energy for socializing in friendship or that women who are home with young children frequently have no easy access to transportation. Mothers who have day-long charge of children bring a third (and a fourth and a fifth) participant to friendships that, in other circumstances, are contracted between two friends alone. Mothers must construct an intimate relationship in a collective context.

Friendships may be personal and private and relatively free of procedural rules and rituals, but they are not endlessly varying free relationships. In charting the essential practices of best friendship, surveying the normative realm, and noting residual and customary uniformities, we note the ordering influence of marriage, family, and work. Family commitments shape constellations of values and practices in friendship. Marital status and stage of childrearing become salient characteristics for recruiting friends. Among desirable subjects of conversation are those dimensions of wifehood and motherhood that women friends protect from devaluation, if only by mutually acknowledging their interest in them. Among moral obligations between friends, ultimate responsibility for each other's children figures prominently. The companionate values of self-disclosure, intimacy, and empathy that women find distinctive to friendship rather than marriage become friendship's standards of commitment. Contemporary close friendship thus responds to needs engendered in the nuclear family, incorporated in a companionate marriage ideal, but not fully satisfied in marital love and companionship.

It is easy to imagine that changing family patterns could shift or change the core of friendship's standards of commitment. New patterns of moral discourse, sociability, or conflict among friends might respond to changes in marital power or division of labor. Under some circumstances, friendship patterns might develop more autonomously of marriage and family commitments. At present, however, despite the very personal and private character of close friendship, it remains in the orbit of family commitments.