The Secret to Better Weekends with Kids

Maybe you need to see other people …

Impromptu family hot tub party

Both of our weekends as parents used to suck, and neither of us could figure out why. We had a lot of theories: Lindsay thought she might need more time to herself, so she and her husband started doing more shifts. But no, that didn’t really solve it. Maybe they were doing too much shift care and instead needed to do more fun things as a family? That was how Chloe already spent her weekends, and sometimes it was nice, but just as often the kids were cranky and whiny and then both parents were tired. No matter how we arranged things, a vague feeling of unease seemed to follow us around, and we couldn’t figure out why.

Then we both noticed something: the weekends that felt the best were the ones where we spent a significant amount of time with other people alongside our families: the times when our days were full of bike rides to the beach with another family, meeting friends for a picnic in the park, or even just eating leftovers standing up in our neighbors’ kitchen. On weekends like these, we stopped thinking so much about the optimal way to spend our time and just enjoyed ourselves.

This feels so obvious that we hesitate to write about it. Like, oh, you discovered that water is wet? How interesting! But we actually do think this is worth writing about, because even though we all know that socializing is good for us, we aren’t doing it as much as we used to. According to one study, adults’ average number of friendships decreased by a third from 1985 to 2004. Meanwhile, the amount of time parents spend with their children increased dramatically, tripling for married fathers and increasing by nearly a third for married mothers. If it seems like everyone spends their weekends hanging out with their kids and not their friends, it’s not just you, and it hasn’t always been this way. A social life is no longer something people have by default. Like exercise, it’s something we have to carve out time for on purpose. And those of us who do socialize a lot only manage to pull it off because we put in deliberate effort.

This post will have two parts: First, we’ll try to convince you that trying to hang out with other families more on the weekends is a good idea (if you’re already there, feel free to skip this part!). Next, I’ll move on to how to make that happen.

Why hanging out with other families makes for better weekends

Reason 1: It makes parenting easier

Hanging out with your kids alone all weekend can be exhausting. But the counterintuitive way to make it easier is to add more kids. When you gather with another family, the kids can go off and entertain themselves, leaving the adults free to talk without getting interrupted every five seconds.

Reason 2: It’s good for kids

Our kids are usually way happier when we’re around another family. This may have something to do with the fact that we tend to supervise them a little less closely: we arrive at a friends’ house and the kids all disappear upstairs while the adults are preparing dinner. Or we meet up at the park and they explore the creek while the adults sit on a bench and chat. We love watching from a distance as the kids form a high energy, temporarily self-governing tribe that navigates group dynamics and conflict at a slight remove from their parents.

The “at a slight remove” part is important! Chloe remembers getting incredibly annoyed at the shrill, animalistic noises her girls would make whenever they reunited with their oldest friends from preschool. But then another parent pointed out to her that it was a form of self-harmonizing: they were using their voices to find a shared frequency, inscrutable to adults but somehow vital to the kids. Now she can appreciate the beauty of these interactions—but preferably from the other side of the house!

If the kids are having a problem they can’t deal with on their own, they’ll generally tell you. But you may find that when parents are out of sight, kids have a higher capacity for problem solving on their own, and everyone gets along better when there are friends in the mix. There are so few opportunities for kids to be truly independent these days, but getting together with other families can provide the conditions for them to get a taste of it.

Reason 3: You might not get as much done, but you won’t care

Humans are fundamentally social creatures. We need to interact with other people, in person, to feel our best. This is true for everyone—kids and adults, introverts and extroverts—even if we vary in the specific amount of socializing that we need. Social isolation is now so common, especially after Covid, that many of us have gotten used to it. If you’ve been accustomed to productive, predictable, but isolated weekends, you might find that being more social adds enough joy to your life that you don’t mind having less time to catch up on chores.

We don’t want to minimize the tradeoffs, though. One night last week, Chloe came back from dinner with friends ready for some quiet relaxing time, only to find seven kids at her house (of which three were hers). Opening your home and your life to other families is beautiful, but it’s also loud and sometimes chaotic. We prefer that to being lonely all the time, but you do have to get the balance right, and it doesn’t look exactly the same for every family.

Reason 4: You’ll build the trust that’s necessary for more shared care

Hanging out with other families you already know well is wonderful: you can just relax and be yourself without worrying about what to talk about. But it’s worth dealing with the discomforts that often come with getting to know new people, because when you do so, you’re laying the foundation for future opportunities to share care across households.

How to make your weekends more social

For some people, socializing more with other families on the weekends is as simple as just deciding to start doing it. But if you’re reading this, we’re guessing it’s because something bigger is blocking you. Let’s go through some possibilities, and solutions for each.

Blocker 1: You don’t have other families to hang out with

This is probably the biggest one. Many parents today don’t have another family they feel comfortable texting, “hey, want to come over for dinner tonight?”

The easiest way to start building friendships with other families is through your kids. If your kid is already hanging out with another kid at school, that’s reason enough to invite their family over for dinner to get to know them better.

If it feels weird to invite a family you don’t know well to do something one-on-one, another option is to organize a casual group hangout. This could be inviting all the families in your kid’s class to the park on a nice day, or inviting the families of your kid’s three closest friends over to roast marshmallows in your backyard.

And if you’re already doing weekend extracurriculars where the parents are attending with their kids, that’s a super easy jumping off point for socializing. Next time you’re at karate class, instead of looking at your phone, why not strike up a conversation with one of the parents sitting nearby? It’s not a sin to zone out and look at your phone in your precious 45 minutes of downtime, but it also wouldn’t hurt to occasionally talk to someone!

Blocker 2: You invite other families to do things but they say no

When you invite a family to do something and they say no, it can feel like a personal rejection. But there are many reasons why someone might decline an invitation, and usually it has nothing to do with you as a person. These include:

You’re inviting them to something that isn’t convenient. Everyone has different schedules and routines. Lindsay likes to work out on weekend mornings, so if someone invites her to do something early, she’s going to say no. Experiment with inviting people to activities at different times of day. Or just ask someone what works for them: “Want to get together this weekend? What times are convenient for you guys?”

You’re asking them to commit too far in advance. When families have a packed schedule, it can make them hesitant to commit to something far ahead of time. What if they end up feeling exhausted that day, or things just feel really hectic? Surprisingly, last minute invites are often much easier to say yes to.

Try sending a casual text a few hours to a couple days in advance. Or maybe you’re already at your kid’s soccer game, and you can just ask them in person: “want to grab tacos after the game?” This sort of serendipitous, last-minute invite is a key secret to easy social time with other families. You can’t always count on it working out, but it’s often the easiest way to get a yes.

You give up too early. Invite someone to do something 3 times, a few weeks apart, before you stop trying. After that, you can stop and try someone else!

Most importantly, don’t let one family’s failure to prioritize in-person gathering make you give up on the whole endeavor. Our culture is at a low point when it comes to gathering, so you’ll likely have to handle several no’s or low-enthusiasm responses until you find a family ready to jump in. It’s not you! We’re all out of practice and need to rebuild the muscle.

Blocker 3: Your partner is an introvert (or you are)

Chloe and Lindsay are both married to introverts. So we know a thing or two about building community while navigating this dynamic (and plan to do a full post about it in the near future). One thing we’ve learned is that even introverts benefit from hanging out with other families more often. Here’s why: it’s not about replacing alone time with social time. It’s about adding friends to the time you were already spending with your family. When you are a parent, the choice isn’t “blissful alone time” versus “tiring socializing”. It’s “time with your family where your kids are constantly pestering you” versus “socializing with another family and all the kids go off and play.” That’s a big step up, whether you’re an introvert or an extrovert.

If you’re an extrovert married to an introvert, you don’t have to drag your partner around every time you want to hang out with another family. Embrace hanging out with other families when you’re taking care of your kids solo and your partner is getting alone time. Lindsay tries to meet up with other families whenever possible during her weekend childcare shifts. She has more fun, stays out for longer, and gives her husband more time at less cost to herself. Everyone wins.

Blocker 4: Your weekends are packed with kids’ activities

It’s genuinely hard to socialize with other families if your weekends are totally packed with kids’ activities. Even if you do have some downtime, you’ll likely feel too drained to socialize. That’s why we think it’s a good idea to try and leave at least one stretch of weekend time open and available for spontaneous plans.

If you have multiple kids, this can be easier said than done. But it helps a lot to coordinate activities with other families! Chloe lives in a rural area where many activities involve a significant amount of driving. To make things easier, she has her girls sign up for activities with friends so they can carpool. With three girls all enrolled in various activities, this strategy saves many hours and makes life way less exhausting. It involves a lot of coordination and texting with other families, which can get annoying, but it’s still better than doing it all on your own.

Blocker 5: Your standards are way too high

We sometimes hear from parents who say they long for more in-person connection, but hosting stresses them out, or they’re worried that their house is too small, or too dirty, or that inviting another family over will involve too much work. If this is you, we strongly urge you to scale down your expectations. Hosting people doesn’t have to mean preparing an elaborate experience for them. You’re not a restaurant!

When Chloe’s kids were younger, her friend sent her a blog post about “crappy dinner parties”. The basic idea was that you don’t clean your house, you defrost something to eat, and no one leaves until they help with the dishes. With these lower standards, she started seeing her friends a lot more often. Lindsay shares a similar dynamic with a few friends who do “leftovers dinner parties”—everyone pools whatever leftovers they have and call it dinner. If hosting in your 20s was about proving that you can be a fancy adult, hosting when you have kids is about letting these standards go and just leaning on other people.

Weekend hangout inspiration

Ready to start hanging out with other families on weekends more? Cool! Here’s a list of ideas to get you going:

• Potluck with two other families: two families is often easier than one, because it’s more people to keep the conversation going! If dinner isn’t a convenient time, try brunch.

• Stoop coffee: Make a pot of coffee and invite neighbors to share it with you on your front steps. No pressure to clean your house or cook, this is one of the absolute easiest ways to host.

• Pizza + movie night: order a pizza and put a movie on for the kids so the adults can talk and hang out

• Group bike ride: the month Lindsay’s son started kindergarten, she organized a casual bike ride for any kindergarten families that wanted to join. It was glorious!

• Leftovers dinner: for families we know pretty well, we love doing super casual dinners where we both just bring whatever is in our fridge to one of our houses and call it dinner

• Rent out a campsite and invite a bunch of families to camp for the night (or just stay for dinner and then go home to a real bed). Lindsay has met some of her closest friends in the city this way.

• Backyard s’mores: if you have a firepit, invite other families to roast marshmallows after dinner

• Add a family night: if there’s an easy, affordable local restaurant your family enjoys, just invite another family the next time you go. You were going anyway, so it’ll be a bonus if they can join!