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Nobody predicted that the year of female friendship would also be a very good year for mum group drama. Barbie grossed over a billion dollars. The internet couldn’t stop talking about the transformative power of women choosing each other. Somewhere in the middle of all that, Ashley Tisdale was being quietly phased out of her celebrity mum WhatsApp group and finding out about it via someone’s Instagram Story.
She wrote about the experience for The Cut — honestly, without score-settling — and the response was immediate. Mothers everywhere recognised it. Not the famous names involved, though people found those soon enough, but the feeling itself: the stomach-drop of an invitation that never came, the exhausting performance of pretending you hadn’t noticed. There is a whole literary genre built on exactly this.
When the village turns on itself
The appeal of a mother friendship group makes complete sense once you’ve heard what new motherhood actually feels like. Friends without children love you but can’t quite reach you where you are. Finding a group of women living the same version of the same day feels appealing.
Without genuine compatibility holding them together, proximity friendships can hollow out surprisingly fast, and what fills the gap is rarely pretty. Mother friendship groups have the added weight of forming somewhere already loaded with associations most women would rather leave behind. The school gate is not a neutral venue. For many, it is a direct line back to adolescence — to the specific anxiety of wanting to be liked, of reading too much into who stood with whom.
Quick Reads
View AllWhatsApp is where it plays out. The passive-aggressive message, warm with exclamation marks and emoji, is by now its own cultural institution — “Just a reminder that Tuesday’s bake sale is NUT FREE :)” — and mother group chats have become notorious for producing them. Women are socialised to present as warm and accommodating; directness still reads, unfairly, as hostility.
Take the Pratap Vihar Residents group on WhatsApp — a Noida housing society chat that began with electricity outage alerts and slowly became a stage for competitive school updates, loaded silences, and one extremely long argument about whether the Diwali decorations were a fire hazard.
Text is a bad medium for nuance at the best of times. In a group of women who see each other every single morning, a misread message can quietly become a months-long grudge.
The impossible standard
Every woman inside a mother friendship group is already carrying a considerable amount of external pressure before the group dynamics even begin. The yummy mummy — the attractive, composed, apparently effortless mother who has somehow kept hold of both her figure and her sanity — may sound like a relic of heat magazine circa 2006, but the version of her that lives on Instagram and TikTok is doing just fine.
Researchers looking at tabloid coverage of celebrity mothers have argued that the media has long sorted mothers into good and bad, using appearance and lifestyle choices as stand-ins for moral character. Kate Middleton was praised for re-wearing dresses. Kim Kardashian was mocked for her body during pregnancy. Neither was presented as a passing observation. Both were offered as evidence of who these women really were. Mothers absorbed those messages and carried them, often without realising, into their own friendships.
A researcher named Angela Anderson has called this horizontal violence. Rather than questioning the standard itself — which is, on any honest assessment, completely unreachable — women begin holding each other to it instead. The group that slowly stops including someone is not sitting around plotting. It has simply, decided who fits.
Why no one speaks up
The part that tends to go unexamined is what happens to the women who watch someone being frozen out and say nothing. Belonging to a group, any group, carries its own quiet reward. Losing your place in it is a real social cost, and most people, when it comes down to it, will protect themselves. That is not cruelty. It is just how groups work.
What Tisdale’s essay caught, and what thousands of mothers responded to, was not only the hurt of being excluded — though that hurt is real, and more often dismissed than it should be. It was the particular bewilderment of it happening here, in a space that was supposed to feel like solidarity.
The village that was meant to hold you together becoming the place you most dread. The question worth asking isn’t who was right in any individual falling-out. It is why a culture that piles this much pressure onto mothers — on how they look, how they parent, how cheerfully they appear to manage all of it — seems almost guaranteed to make this kind of thing happen. The group chat is just where it finally shows up.