This Mom Says She Doesn’t Have Time For Female Friendships

As a mom, life gets…insane. We all know this. We’re driving kids here and there. We’re working full-time. We’re meal planning and doing laundry and just living busy lives filled with never-ending to-do lists. Despite all this busyness, I still make time to hang out with my girlfriends. I still text them regularly (I’d die without my mom group chats), and we still go out to dinner and drinks when we can.

My female friendships fill my cup up in a way that my kid and my husband, and my other “whys” just don’t. So, when I came across a video from a very popular TikTok mom creator who said she’s a bad friend and does not make time for any sort of female friendships, I was shook to my core — and I was not alone in that.

TikTok creator, homeschooler, and mom to five boys, Brooke Raybould, shared in a now-viral video that she is a “bad friend” in her current season of life.

“This morning I woke up and thought this is it: five boys who call me mom, a husband I actually wanna hang out with, and a business I built from scratch,” she begins.

“Here’s the truth: I don’t prioritize friendship in this season. Not because I don’t like you. Not because you’re not amazing, but because my time is my most expensive currency. And if I give you any of it, you’re a big freaking deal.”

She goes on to say that she doesn’t have a lot of friends because her standards are too high. Those standards include: Do you make my life better or just busier?

“I poured years into building this life — the family I dreamed of, the work that lights me up. And now that I’m here, I just wanna be in it, fully, and between homeschooling five kids, running a business I love, and building a marriage I’m proud of, my free minutes are rare. And I guard them like gold.”

“Now, I found my dream circle right here in my home. Five built-in best friends for life, and I married my sixth. Plus, a business I could get lost in. My life is already full. So if I make time for something extra, it has to be worth trading for what I already have.”

She doesn’t do mom’s nights. She says she doesn’t “thrive in small talk,” because life is short and she doesn’t think friendships are worth it.

“If you wanna prioritize friends, that’s seriously amazing. But if you’re more like me, maybe this is your permission to stop feeling guilty about not needing more. Because your life already feels cold. So, to every mom who feels like she should have more friends. If your circle is small but solid, that’s enough. If your happiest hours are spent at home, that’s enough. You’re not missing anything. You already have everything that matters. And that’s worth protecting with everything you’ve got.”

OOF – okay, there’s a lot to unpack here!

Several moms commented on the video, noting that this kind of trad-wife thinking can be extremely toxic, feeding into a patriarchal notion to isolate women.

“Placing the expectation on your children to be your best friends (in lieu of healthy relationships with other adults) is INSANE,” one mom wrote.

“I also want folks to think critically about this ‘season’ talk. It’s the favorite word of folks from this corner of the internet, but it’s misleading. They’re implying ‘it’ll only be a few years ladies you can make the trade off.’ The reality is that this ‘season’ restarts every single time you add another baby to the mix. So, if you wind up having a larger family your ‘season’ could last 15-20 years until your youngest and final child is out of the small child phase. By that time where are the friends you’ve set aside, where is that career you put on pause etc …..it’s a bait and switch,” another wrote.

Another commented. “Your kids want a mother not a martyr. As Carl Jung one said ‘the greatest burden you can place on a child is the unlived life of a parent.’ Ask your husband to step up do his job so you can go out and have some friends.”

One wrote, “usually abused women are isolated from their friends I don’t know, and they often think it’s their own idea.”

Several content creators also weighed in on Raybould’s hot take, stitching the video and sharing their own thoughts.

“Welcome to the latest in tradwifing!” TikTok creator Liz Minnella said in her video.

“We’ve moved on from sourdough and anti-vaxxing to now encouraging women to reject female friendship. We’re basically saying if you’re burnt out and overwhelmed because of the systems and institutions in our country that are not set up to support women, don’t rage against the patriarchy or ask your husband to step up or advocate for things like family leave or universal pre-k. Nope, that’s a waste of time. Have you thought about just like, not having friends?”

She calls Rayboul’s thinking “nefarious,” sharing that this is about “isolating women.”

“It’s what a fascist government does. They want to break our community structures so we don’t have the opportunity to band together and rise up against them. And I’m seeing a backlash to this tradwife movement online that’s all about women tapping into their witchy and coven tendencies and relying on each other and elevating the importance of female friendships. So that’s the kind of content we need to lift up because this is reaching these young women in their 20s who are young moms and trying to figure out how to balance work and motherhood and the stress and weight of their responsibilities. And they see that content and they go, ‘Oh, okay, maybe, yeah, maybe I should not prioritize my female friendships.’ And it’s so incredibly wrong because those relationships are your lifeline. If we want to, as women, rise up and overcome these systems of oppression, we need to do it together and we need to encourage other women to prioritize female friendships.”

PERIOD.

It seems that Raybould knew how controversial her take would be, so, in her caption, she clarified: “If this doesn’t make sense to you, that’s okay! And if you aim to prioritize friendships, I truly think that is AWESOME. But for those of us who find wholeness in our homes and peace in solitude, I want you to know I am like that too. Neither is wrong. The best thing you can do is live in alignment with the way you’re wired! 🩶”