From Kids’ Friends to Parent Friends to Family

Making friends with other parents can be tough — the endless quest to find someone (let alone another couple) with a compatible sense of humor; friction-free political proclivities; dining, drinking, and vacationing preferences (and budgets); not to mention the fact that your kids have to get along, too — but finding “your people” can be wonderfully worth the effort.

“I moved back to Santa Barbara from San Francisco when my daughter Frances was 16 months old,” said Charla Bregante. Charla grew up in Goleta, but when she returned to town after years in the Bay Area, most of her old friends were either gone or at different phases in their lives. She was a stay-at-home mom as well, creating an even greater need for adult conversation.

She started out joining the Moms Club in Santa Barbara, which was a weekly way to talk to adults and to make friends. But preschool was really where she began to make close connections. She wanted a co-op situation, for both financial and friendship reasons. “I was considering either Starr King or The Oaks for Frances (both well-regarded parent-child workshops have been around since the 1940s), and I toured both of them. I decided they both were going to be great for her. But where were my people?”

After visiting both places a couple of times, hanging out, and talking to some people, Charla said, “I liked the parents at both places, but I really felt this connection at Starr King to the people I talked to. The decision between those two places was more about me than Frances, because she would have been fine at either.”

Soon after she had her second child, Miles, “Frances came home from preschool one day and told me about her friend, Lily,” says Charla. “I had never met Lily, and we had just had a new baby, and so I wondered if Frances maybe was making it up … an imaginary friend.”

She laughs, “I asked her, ‘Frances, is Lily a real girl?’ And it turned out Lily was very real. And they were inseparable at preschool. So I had to meet the parents. … We just really hit it off.” She got along great with Terri and Charlie, Lily’s parents, right from the get-go. It was through them that she made other friends as well — a whole group of them.

The girls are now 25, and roommates in Seattle, and those families are still some of Charla’s closest friends in Santa Barbara. “We just discovered all kinds of other connections. My family had been to June Lake for a couple of vacations, and we found out that one of the other families we had gotten close to camped at June Lake every summer — so we started going with them more than 20 years ago.”

Over the years, the kids all became “almost like cousins,” says Charla. Many of the families migrated over to the Unitarian Society (which coincidentally shares space with Starr King), “So once our kids were out of preschool, that kept us connected. And it kept us planning other social events, because we just had an automatic way of seeing each other.”

She adds, “We quickly became families that hung out together, doing things on the weekends. Lots of lots of barbecues and potlucks, and lots of playdates, back and forth.” Those friendships have really stuck over the years, and “that group kind of became like an extended family. I think all of our kids … feel like cousins and aunts. … Even now, when some of the kids have sort of drifted apart, they still are happy to be together when we are all together.”

This is not an unusual situation with parents who meet at Starr King. Over the years, Charla says she’s met many people who have formed lifelong adult friendships through the school.

But it does help to have that kid connection. When Charla’s son was 4, there was a mom of another boy (Ethan) she really liked at the preschool, Judith Smith Meyer. “It was Miles’s birthday, and he was making his guest list. And I said, ‘How about Ethan? Can we invite Ethan?’ … and he didn’t really want to invite Ethan. He didn’t dislike him, but it wasn’t who he wanted to invite,” she laughs. “I finally came clean and said, ‘I’d really love to have Judith come to your party. Can we invite Ethan?’ And Miles said, ‘You can invite Judith, but I’m not going to invite Ethan’ — he was 4!”

Needless to say, Meyer and Bregante are still friendly, but they don’t see each other as often as they’d like.

“The first time I went to pick Frances up at Lily’s house, Terri warned me; she said, ‘We live in a house where not everything has a place.’ And when she said that, I knew we could be friends.”

That was more than 20 years ago, and they’re still the best of friends. “When you find your people, you just know it.”