“This is too high school for me and I don’t want to take part in it anymore.” That’s the text actress Ashley Tisdale sent cutting ties with her mom group after being left out of yet another hang.
The High School Musical star and mom of two made headlines this week for her first-person essay in The Cut about “breaking up” with her toxic mom group.
At first, Tisdale, who has two daughters, Jupiter, 4, and Emerson, 1, with husband Christopher French, felt “lucky” to be part of a group of women—which included the likes of Hilary Duff, Meghan Trainor and Mandy Moore—all navigating the early stages of motherhood together.
“I felt a sense of belonging,” the 40-year-old wrote in the article. “And it made me hopeful about finding the balance between fulfilling work and family life, since all these cool women were able to do it. Maybe we’d be able to share our secrets to success. By the time we started getting together for playdates and got the group chat going, I was certain that I’d found my village.”
But then something shifted. Tisdale recalled being left out of group get-togethers like birthdays and dinner parties, only to see what she had been excluded from on Instagram stories.
She tried not to “take things personally” but the dynamic had shifted to something akin to being in high school, like she had found herself amongst a group of mean girls. In her new role as mom, she couldn’t keep quiet about how she felt any longer.
Mom Leslie Dobson can resonate with Tisdale’s experience. As a mom of two—one in TK and the other in third grade—Dobson described being “in the thick of it” at her kids’ schools.
While there wasn’t a specific moment where she realized the dynamic among her mom group had become toxic, Dobson, who is also a clinical psychologist, found herself putting others’ needs above her own and those of her children.
“The moms made many jabs at each other, and I left playdates feeling tired and ruminating on rude statements that were made to me or around me about others,” she told Newsweek. “I also noticed my children were not as happy over time.”
Dobson felt uneasy about some of the other moms’ children in the group, but since the group members wanted to socialize, she let her kids spend time with theirs.
“I stopped listening to my intuition, because I could feel a social pressure building,” she said.
Dr. Ashwini Nadkarni, MD, an assistant professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, explained how mom groups are formed by women seeking connection and support. When these values and goals are lost, support fades and toxic dynamics develop.
“Examples of such factors include gossip that a few members of the group initiate amongst themselves within subgroups, dominant personalities and ‘us versus them’ dynamics,” Nadkarni told Newsweek. “In this way, shared values erode, alongside trust and accountability.”
For Dobson, removing herself from the mom group was the right decision for her family. “We all agreed that we really did not like certain people or children in the group, and we felt forced,” she said. “It allowed us to feel more confident to trust our intuitions, act on them, talk to each other, and we felt more like ourselves again.”
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