Ashley Tisdale French raised eyebrows after revealing the alleged toxicity in her mom group — and fellow former child star Christy Carlson Romano has thoughts.
“Celeb mom drama is wild to watch unfold from outside the group,” Romano, 41, wrote via Instagram on Monday, January 5, also adding in her caption that she is “minding my business.”
Tisdale French, 40, published a now-viral essay for The Cut earlier this month, titled “Breaking Up With My Toxic Mom Group.” Without naming members of her one-time inner circle, the High School Musical star expressed that she recently noticed a “growing distance” from her so-called friends.
“I was starting to feel frozen out of the group, noticing every way that they seemed to exclude me,” Ashley, who shares two daughters with husband Christopher French, wrote in her article. “I have never considered the moms to be bad people … But I do think our group dynamic stopped being healthy and positive — for me, anyway.”
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While Ashley expressed her reasons for distancing herself from the group, Carlson Romano has a different take.
“I don’t identify as a celebrity. I think I’m a public person, but I don’t ever go around calling myself a celeb,” the Evan Stevens alum, who lives in Texas with husband Brendan Rooney and their two daughters, began a Tuesday, January 6, Instagram video. “I think that mom groups are really important to people when they first have their baby.”
She continued, “I think it aligns you with a certain kind of tribe to help you get through postpartum hormones and stuff like that. I think it’s really great, [and] that’s why mommy-and-me classes exist.”
Carlson Romano, however, pointed out that the circles do start to get “a little trickier” as the kids age out of the infant phase.
“You can have friends[hips] with the moms, but if the kids don’t get along, sometimes you end up cycling out of those friendships,” Carlson Romano explained. “That kinda sucks, but in the end, if you can make time for the people that matter to you, they should be giving back to you as much as you’re putting out. If that dynamic shifts, then just find another group of friends.”
Carlson Romano further stressed that mom groups aren’t “supposed to be dramatic.”
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“But, I get it,” she added. “Sometimes it gets a little crazy — and then you write an article about it.”
Ashley has not responded to Carlson Romano’s thoughts or publicly addressed the controversy surrounding her essay. Her husband, Christopher, however, does seemingly have her back.
“It’s your choice whether or not to engage,” a quote from artist Tyler Spangler read, which Christopher, 44, reshared via his Instagram Stories on Tuesday.
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Ashley was notably friends with Hilary Duff, Mandy Moore, Meghan Trainor and more famous moms during the coronavirus pandemic.
“We had babies at the same time,” Moore, 41, previously told In Style in 2022. “And [Hilary], being the supermom that she is, formed a cool mom club. Somehow, I got invited into it, and it’s the best.”
It’s not known whether Moore and Duff’s squad is the same toxic group that Ashley wrote about in The Cut, though Duff’s husband, Matthew Koma, subtly poked fun at the ongoing speculation.
“A mom group tell-all through a father’s eyes: When you’re the most self-obsessed tone-deaf person on earth, other moms tend to shift focus to their actual toddlers,” Koma, 38, wrote via his Instagram Stories on Tuesday, pretending to have authored his own tell-all exposé.
