When we know friends from old days, some will eventually drift apart and not being as close as before. One of the reasons they have is because they have a family and they are busy after having children… but I never understood how does it conflict with keeping in touch and staying close with friends ? Do they lock themselves in the house and stare at their kids besides working for diaper money outside ? They will still need social interactions besides children and spouse, no ? I always find that to be some lame excuse
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Social interactions with people you genuinely love and enjoy are very potent and fulfilling. They also get social interactions at work and other places. And honestly things take so much time and energy to do fully and well. You want to spend some quality time with your family, and do well at your job, and be healthy and cook healthy meals and exercise. Well, there goes all your time
If you have a friend that is genuinly happy with their family life and they are living a healthy life full of good experiences then their life just naturally fills up with people wanting to spend time with them and plans to do wholesome fulfilling stuff. You’re gonna have to put in effort to get to be a part of that
So short answer is being an important figure in a family is a big responsibility that requires a lot of their attention and time
Maybe you can offer some things to do together with the kids… Parks, lunches idk.
Also for parents you need to set the meeting with anticipation in case they can leave the kinds with someone or even the other parent.
Some people just don’t have time. Life gets hard and busy.
Raising kids takes an enormous amount of time, effort, and money. Socializing with friends is important too, it’s just less frequent by necessity.
If you sincerely think it’s a “lame excuse” there’s a good chance you’ve driven some of these prior friends away with your attitude.
Having kids is both time and energy consuming, and relatively socially fulfilling. Especially when the kids are quite young.
Personally I found that after I had kids, I discovered that we were the ones usually initiating social time and doing more of the hosting. We barely heard from our local friends for at least a year, once we stopped being the proactive ones. It was partly because of what was going on in their romantic relationships as well. But anyway, I’m sure they had some reasoning for not contacting us that made sense to them.
Right now I have some new friends that have asked to hang out more. But again, it’s only if I’m the one organizing it. So I do organize hangouts, but it’s a lot less than it would be if they would also be proactive.