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Motherhood can be full of people and still feel lonely.

In this episode, Allison reflects on Mother’s Day and Maternal Mental Health month and shares why connection with other women is one of the most overlooked tools for maternal wellbeing.

Between school schedules, sports practices, and endless logistics, many moms spend their days surrounded by people but rarely experience true, nourishing connection. Research shows that loneliness is a major contributor to parental stress, and meaningful friendships can play a powerful role in protecting maternal mental health.

Allison shares personal stories about friendships formed through hobbies, volunteering, small acts of kindness, and simple follow-through. She explains why intentional connection matters more than occasional sideline conversations.

Most importantly, she offers practical, realistic ways to build deeper relationships, even in the middle of a very full life. Because connection doesn’t require a big event. It requires intention.

This episode is for you if:
— You feel disconnected from friends in this season of motherhood
— You want deeper relationships but aren’t sure where to start
— You’re craving more adult conversation and connection
— Your schedule feels full but your cup still feels empty
— You’ve been meaning to reach out to someone, but haven’t yet

Looking for expert guidance on your child’s sleep? Allison offers two free age-specific guides to help you discover how much sleep kids need to thrive—at any age. Get your free copy now: 0-2 Years Old or 3 to 10 years old

From baby sleep to toddler sleep, daycare naps to sleep training—How Long ’Til Bedtime? is the podcast for parents who want practical, guilt-free sleep tips they can actually use.

Hosted by pediatric sleep coach Allison Egidi, each episode delivers real solutions for every stage—from navigating newborn sleep struggles and weaning night feedings to helping your 3-year-old fall asleep independently (and stay asleep!). Whether you’re trying to make sense of daycare sleep patterns, craving your evenings back, or simply need a working mom podcast to keep you grounded, you’re in the right place.

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Scroll down for a full transcript of this episode.

239. The Gift Moms Actually Need – Intentional Connection With Other Women
Before we dive in today, I want to take a moment to wish all of the moms listening a very happy belated Mother’s Day. I hope you felt celebrated and loved this weekend. I don’t know about you, but on Mother’s Day, I always find myself wanting a mix of both family time and alone time where I don’t have to worry about the typical Sunday responsibilities. I hope you were celebrated and appreciated in whatever way fills your cup.

Okay, on to today’s episode, which was actually inspired by Mother’s Day and my reflecting on being a mom. I want to talk about something that I think matters deeply for moms and doesn’t get nearly enough airtime. It’s not sleep, not schedules, not routines. Today we’re talking about your relationships. More specifically, connection with women in your life.

Hey there, Allison here. Welcome back to How Long ‘Til Bedtime. All right, I want to ask you something. When was the last time you had a real conversation with a friend? Not a chat while you were chasing your toddlers around the playground. Not a quick exchange on the sidelines of soccer game. Not a text thread about carpooling. Not a wave across the parking lot at preschool pickup. I mean, a real conversation. The kind where you leave feeling seen and energized and a little bit more like yourself.

For a lot of moms, the honest answer is it’s been a while. And I get it. When you’re a mom, is so easy to be completely consumed by the logistics of motherhood, the appointments, the practices, the play dates, the school events. We are masterful at filling our calendars with everything our kids need. And somewhere in all of that, our own need for connection seems to quietly slip off the list. Today, I want to talk about why I think female connection matters and more importantly, what we can actually do about it because I think intentional connection with other women is one of the most underrated tools for our own wellbeing as a mom. And I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again and again, your wellbeing matters. It matters for you and it matters for your family.

In addition to the fact that I thought about this episode because Mother’s Day was coming up, May is also Maternal Mental Health Awareness Month. And I genuinely believe that intentional connection with other women is one of the most underutilized tools for maternal mental health. In fact, in 2024, the US Surgeon General issued an advisory specifically about parental stress. And it found that nearly half of parents said their stress felt completely overwhelming on most days. Loneliness was one of the top reasons these parents listed. And a major study published in 2025 that looked at nearly 200,000 mothers found significant declines in self-reported maternal mental health between 2016 and 2023 and that was across all socioeconomic groups. And research consistently shows that strong friendships are associated with lower rates of depression and anxiety. Friends provide a sense of belonging, reduce loneliness, and offer support during hard times. One clinical psychologist, Alexis Menken, put it really well when she said, that for mothers specifically, the support from other moms carries something unique. It’s the shared experience of someone who understands the unspoken flip side to the joys of parenting.

So when I talk today about building intentional connection, I’m not just talking about something that I think is nice for us to have. I’m talking about something that research suggests actually matters for your mental health. Now I want to start by making an important distinction. Many moms are around other moms a lot. We’re at the soccer fields, the swim meets, the school pickup lines, the birthday parties, and we chat. We catch up. We commiserate about bedtimes and homework and how fast our kids are growing up. And that is nice, but it’s not the same as intentional connection. Sideline socializing is, I guess we’ll call it reactive. It happens when your schedules happen to overlap. Intentional connection is something you make happen on purpose.

I think the difference between having a rushed conversation with a friend before or after a tennis match, versus sitting across from her at a coffee shop with nowhere to be for an hour is very significant. Same person, but a completely different experience. One leaves me feeling like we touched base. The other leaves me feeling genuinely nourished. And I think a lot of moms are surviving on the touch base version of friendship, when what we actually need is the nourishing version.

I want to share a story that really sparked my whole thought process on all of this. About a year ago, I was at one of my daughter’s basketball tournaments and I ended up chatting with a mom who I didn’t know. We were staying at the same hotel with our girls and decided to have dinner together. We pretty quickly went deep, chatted about our career journeys, being working moms, our kids, all of it. She was so thoughtful and very interesting. And not long after, she invited me to one of her social gatherings. Here’s what she does. And I think it’s genuinely one of the most inspired ideas I have come across for connection in my neck of the woods. She hosts small gatherings of women, I think it’s quarterly.

She invites women that she has met from all different corners of her life with the goal of fostering intentional connection. So some of these people she’s known for years and some she just met last week and some of them know each other. Some people don’t know anyone and each time it’s a little bit different group. Each of these gatherings has a specific topic or theme.

The first one I was able to attend was a fall brunch where the conversation centered on how we were going to set our priorities around the holidays and what was actually important to us, the women in the room. I did not know a single person there other than the host. And I was actually excited about going to that and meeting new people. It was about 20 women, two and a half hours, real conversation. I left feeling energized in a way I had not really expected.

The most recent one I went to was a little bit different. It was after the new year because the topic was to come ready to talk about the best book that you had read in 2025. So what was it, why we read it, why we loved it. And I think it invited us to share multiple books if we had them, but you were definitely supposed to bring your top book. And I loved hearing what people were reading and why. It genuinely made me up my reading game so far in 2026. I actually recently texted this friend to tell her how glad I am I came to that because I have already read more books and I use read lightly. You guys, I do a combo of reading and audio book, but I’ve already gone through more books so far in 2026 than I did in all of 2025 and I am a reader, but beyond the books, I just thoroughly enjoyed spending time with interesting women who had a different perspective on things and they were people I might not have otherwise met.

I have told many other friends about these gatherings and every time I do the response is the same. What an amazing idea. They also liked the idea of connecting with more women and widening their circle. So today I want to break down not just that idea, but a few ways that you can start building more intentional connection into your life in a way that I hope will truly fill your cup. But before I get into the specific ideas, I want to say this. Intentional connection does not have to be a quarterly gathering of 20 women, like I just mentioned. It can be small. It can be simple, can fit into the margins of your already full life. I have a friend, for example, who we used to work together. She’s actually not a mom and she is so good at scheduling morning walks with me after school drop off. I am forever grateful to her for taking the lead on that and never holding it against me that I am not the one who organizes these. And it’s just a walk, just the two of us, just talking. We went on one of these last week and these walks fill my cup in a way that is actually hard for me to put into words.

She’s intentional about our connection. She knows I’m juggling a lot of things, but she always reaches out to get it on the calendar. And what I do is I follow through. I work with her to find a date and I don’t cancel or reschedule. And the consistency of that, the reliability of knowing that once we have it on the calendar, that time is, is part of what makes it so meaningful. So it’s pretty simple. That’s it. It’s a walk. Just the two of us. You don’t need a brunch with 20 women to experience real connection, but you do need intention and you do need to follow through. I want to share a couple more stories from my own life because I think they illustrate different ways meaningful connections can form.

I’ve gotten to know some really wonderful women through tennis. I picked up tennis as my 40th birthday present to myself. And some of these women are around my age. Some are much younger and some are much older. And one new friendship developed because we have very similar personalities. Let’s just say neither of us is very low key. And it started with us sending each other funny tennis Instagram reels back and forth, which started to turn into more real conversations, which turned into a friendship and really conversations and getting together in a way that I value.

And she’s a younger mom, but we have connected on not only learning how to play tennis because we both were new to tennis, but then also our shared experience as women in the corporate world and our similar sense of humor about things and just our similar ways at looking at a lot of things. And sometimes that’s all it takes, you know, one shared thing like picking up a new hobby that opens the door to other similarities.

I have another tennis friend who actually just lives a few doors up from me and she too has much younger kids, a full-time job, super busy life and a lot on her plate. And I have always loved playing tennis with her. We’ve played tennis together for several years and she’s just smart and witty and kind. But for a long time, when I sat down to reflect on our friendship, I would say we were friendly neighbors more than real friends. But over time, it started to shift. When she welcomed a new baby, I dropped a Starbucks coffee at her door on my way back from school drop-off. When I got in a jam and needed someone to take care of my dog over a weekend, she quickly volunteered to help me out. When she brought home another baby, I made her a meal. When I asked her to join me at an event around women’s mental health, she made time for it and she did. These were small things, easy things, but intentional things. And then something happened in our community, the home explosion that I’ve talked about before and she lived right next door to it and her house was really damaged and her family was and still is displaced. And I was able to show up for her in a bigger way during that time. And that was a way for me to connect with her. But also she was able to accept that help, which I have to tell you by the way is its own kind of generosity. Letting people help you is not always easy. And our connection grew significantly through me wanting and helping her and her family and her being willing to ask for and accept help. So we don’t get together as much as I think we’d both like. Our schedules are genuinely hard to align, but we keep trying and we find time when we can. I met her for a drink last Friday. And what we have now is a real friendship. One that was built through small, consistent acts of showing up.

And when I was thinking about other ways I’ve connected to women who fill my cup, I think about two other women that I’m grateful for that started through volunteering. Over a decade ago, while I was on maternity leave, I decided to volunteer to serve on our community’s Equestrian Center Board. That’s where I met two of my dearest friends, including Beth, who many of you know as the editor of this podcast. And we spent a couple of years volunteering together, which meant a lot of time in the trenches. This was no small volunteering gig. And when our time on the board came to an end, we made a commitment to stay in touch. We scheduled dinner dates several times a year. Obviously she and I connect on work, but we connect outside of this as well. And every couple of years we do a fun girls trip together. In fact, next month we’re going to Amsterdam together. And I honestly cannot wait. That friendship started because we were randomly kind of in the same place volunteering for the same thing and we had this mission in common but it has lasted because we have been intentional about maintaining it even as life has gotten busier and our paths have diverged because the three of us are in three unique stages of parenting and our professional careers. And so we also just are going in three completely different directions, but we make it happen.

I share these examples of how I have made meaningful connections with other women, but I also want to acknowledge that it can be tricky or at least feel tricky to make new connections or friends or to take it beyond that superficial on the sidelines at the birthday party to a meaningful connection. So I just want to kind of recap some of the things I’ve said and leave you with some actionable ideas to think about.

When you have a really good conversation with someone at the soccer tournament, at a work event, at a neighborhood gathering, write her name down in the notes app on your phone. Don’t just think to yourself, I’d love to get to know her better and then forget about it because I’ve had tons of those conversations you guys, where I think I’d love to get to know them and then I kind of forget about it. As you’ve heard in all my stories, a lot of my connections are because someone else made the step to get us together. What I am really good at is the follow through piece. But what I’ve gotten better at doing is making a note in my phone and then I do something about it. I will look at my kind of notes of things I want to do that are I have a personal list of to do things. I try to look at it once a week and I try to take action on something. So make the list on your phone and then have a time each week where you look at it and you do something about it. It could be as simple as a group coffee date or a happy hour, or it could be something a little bit bigger like the quarterly gatherings that my basketball tournament friend hosts. You pick the format of what works for you, both your personality and your time that you have, and you open the door, you might be amazed at who walks through it.

And you don’t have to wait for a crisis to show someone that you’re thinking about them, because I think showing up with simple acts of care is something many of us are capable of doing and many of us are craving. It’s meaningful to us when people do this. A coffee dropped off at someone’s door when you know they have a busy or stressful week or they’re in a stressful season of their life. A text that says, I saw this meme or something, anything you saw that made you think of them. When you have that moment where it reminds you of someone, actually send them that text. Drop off a meal when life gets hard. These small acts of care are connection deposits, and they accumulate into something real over time.

And on the flip side, be willing to ask for help and be willing to accept it. Letting someone show up for you is how you let them in. It’s one of the ways you start to build connection.

Pursue a hobby that puts you in a room with other women who have a similar interest. Tennis has been that for me. But it could be a photography class, an art class, a book club, a running group, a volunteer commitment. A shared experience is one of the fastest paths to real connection. When you’re doing something alongside someone, especially something that challenges you or that you genuinely love doing, conversations are going to naturally happen. And some of those conversations will turn into friendships.

I’m going to say it again, but I’m going to add to it. Reach out to people that you want to connect with and follow through and stick to your commitments. If there’s a woman in your life that you’ve been meaning to reconnect with, so sometimes we lose touch with someone, reach out today, not tomorrow, today, right now, as you’re listening or right when this is done, send a text, mention that you were just thinking about her, suggest getting together, be specific about when you’re going to get together. And then, once you’ve set something up, actually show up. And I cannot stress to you how important this is. If you are constantly rescheduling, constantly being the person who bails, I assure you that that sends a message, whether you intend it to or not. And I assure you of this because I have these people in my life. It tells someone that they are an afterthought and that you don’t value their time as much as you value your own. Real connection and friendship requires follow through. It requires being someone that people can count on to show up.

And when you do get together, I want to recommend that you leave the kids at home when you can. I know it’s not always possible, but when you can try to carve out time that is just for that connection or that friendship, not a playdate where you’re half watching the kids while half talking time that is just yours, even if it’s just an hour, even a walk, because that uninterrupted time is where real connection happens.

I cannot tell you how much I smile to myself when I will see two moms walking in my neighborhood because I think this is so great. They are having time with intentional connection without other distractions. So to wrap up, think one of the greatest gifts that we can give ourselves as moms not just around Mother’s Day or Maternal Mental Health Awareness month, but all year long, is investing in our friendships and connections with other women. We are so good at pouring into our kids. We are so good at showing up for our families, but we also need people who pour into us. Women who see us not just as someone’s mom, but as a full, interesting complex human being. Those relationships do not happen by accident. We are just too busy. They happen with intention.

So this week, write down the name of one woman you want to know better. Actually, forget this week. Today, right now, write down the name of one woman you want to know better. Send a text to a friend that you’ve been meaning to reach out to that maybe you haven’t seen as often as you would like. Show up for one person in a small way and see what grows from there. Happy belated Mother’s Day to all of you. You deserve to be celebrated and you deserve to feel connected. As always, thanks for listening. Bye for now.