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The Motherhood Connection
If you’re a mom looking for online resources, you’re in luck.
Web sites that offer support through articles, chats and message boards abound, and many are published by moms, for moms. The most comprehensive
sites also provide pregnancy guides, recipes, seasonal craft ideas, children’s activities, ages-and-stages child development references, and comic relief. While several of the largest sites are affiliated
with major commercial Web venues, there are also terrific sites for mothers with a less mainstream outlook. Front and Center
Each
of the big women’s Web networks — Oxygen, iVillage, and Women.com — includes a parenting sub-site. Of the three, iVillage
is associated with the most widely recognized resources: Parent Soup and ParentsPlace
. Parent Soup has a long track record of providing parenting tips and support through articles and Q&A features, while ParentsPlace is primarily focused on parent-to-parent
online communities. A number of experts on child-rearing, family issues and children’s health contribute to the content at Parent Soup. iVillage also produces iBaby, an e-commerce site offering infant gear and maternity items.
Women.com has recently expanded its internal
Family section, but this networks’s parenting
resources are not as fully developed as those of its competitors. The parenting guide is bundled with
Crayola FamilyPlay, which offers good children’s activities and instructions for craft projects. Additionally, Women.com’s
alliance with the Hearst media empire connects visitors directly to HomeArts, which has the comprehensive Family Time section
, and online versions of “Good Housekeeping” and other magazines which contain content pertinent to the domestic aspects of motherhood.
The best from the “big three” is Moms Online, now a part of the Oxygen
women’s network. The site has been around for some years, but it’s been given a face lift since it’s induction into the Oxygen fold. Moms Online truly benefits from the peppy new design and reworking of its content; the site previously offered a great selection of resources but looked kind of goofy and was not as easy to navigate. Moms Online is organized into centers providing resources for the domestic front; information and advice on family issues; support for working mothers; a pregnancy guide; and “Dare I Say It”, humorous essays and comments about the daily drill of motherhood. The site also has mom-to-mom message boards and an ages-and-stages child development guide for infants through teens.
My fave among the more commercial Web resources for moms is Myria,
an online magazine for mothers. The site is beautiful, sophisticated and well-organized. Rather than launching another parenting-advice-and-household-tip packed site, the creators of Myria wanted to develop a resource that responded to the broad range of needs and interest of women who share the common bond of motherhood. It’s a refreshing approach. Current and past features are listed with short descriptions in categories that include relationships, style, health/fitness, parenting, home, work and leisure. The publishers of Myria also produce
e-pregnancy, a well-done Web
site for the expecting, and are in the process of building an excellent Web guide for women, SheKnows.com
. (In my opinion, if SheKnows.com continues to grow and stays current, it has the potential to overtake resources such as Yin.com and
Femina as the premier best-of-the-Web guide for women). Another popular site,
The CyberMom Dot Com
(no relation to Cybermommy) offers a full compliment of parenting advice and domestic resources. It’s all encased in a funky retro design; the subsections of the site are organized as a “floor plan” of a typical suburban home. (In other words, “The Study” contains content on work and career issues, “The Kitchen” offers recipes and household tips, and “The Playroom” includes “everything about kids”.) This sounds cooler than it really is. A lot of moms love this Web site, but I find the overlay of the whole “make yourself at home” conceit detracts from the serious content of the site.
Other Voices, Other Choices
For those who are looking for less mainstream resources, there are a number of smaller sites with
original, if less inclusive, content. Salon.com publishes the outstanding Mothers Who Think, a site devoted to commentary written by mothers about the real world, in and outside the home.
OK, the title is
kind of snotty — under normal circumstances, giving birth doesn’t make you brain dead, and the capacity to think is not exclusive to this zine’s contributors. But the articles are informative and, in fact, very thoughtful.
A Web site for moms with progressive attitudes, hipMama
“seeks to provide entertainment, information and stimulation for parents who didn’t check their personalities at the door when their kids were born”. It’s a great site, and although it’s currently in the midst of a rather glitchy redesign and restructuring process, it’s worth a visit. Don’t expect any sugarcoating of the motherhood experience at hipMama. The site is published by a group of women who know their own minds and aren’t afraid to say so. The features include
Mam-bo, a webactive broadcast hosted by Nanci Olesen, chat and message boards, music reviews, and a section for teen moms. hipMama also offers free web-based email accounts through it’s MamaMail
service. Mothers on the Edge of a Nervous Breakdown
Small but succinct, the Real Mom Club is the work of a mother of
three who describes her life as “a living hell” and her children as “spawnlings”. This is a darkly funny site, and every word rings true to the experience of real-life motherhood. Another tell-it-like-it-is resource for “parents on the edge” is
Spilt Milk.net.
Along with humorous, frank commentary about the ins and outs of modern parenthood, there are also practical resources on health, pregnancy and child development. Sanity Central: A Timeout from Parenting
is a site devoted to humour about famliy life and marriage. More flippant than the Real Mom Club, but good if you’re just in the mood for a laugh. Also:
Midlife Mommies addresses the special concerns of mothers over forty,
including mid-life pregnancy, infertility and other health topics, and the need to care for elderly parents. The site also offers resources on career issues and financial planning, feature stories from moms themselves and a community message board.
WomanLinks
is an online community and guide to women’s Web resources that includes a noteworthy collection of resources for mothers and mothers-to-be.For mothers searching
for breastfeeding support, Breastfeeding.com
is an appealing, practical site with plentiful content. The site sponsors an advocacy effort that tracks state and local ordinances prohibiting public breastfeeding and other acts of intolerance. Visitors can also shop online for breastfeeding supplies. If you enjoy cutesy photos, there are countless representations of chubby-cheeked bambinos. (There are also some really dumb cartoons in the humor section of the site that can be safely skipped over).
Information and support for single parents is available from many of the sites in this review. The National Organization of Single Mothers
offers a Web site specifically for single moms. The organization is funded by membership fees (a basic membership is $19.00 a year) and some of the material on the Web site is restricted to members only.
Feature articles and a few other resources are open to all visitors. For those who find comfort in just knowing there are other women sharing a similar experience,
Shawna, a single mother of two, has compiled a folksy home
page with links to the home pages of many other single moms. The Second Wives Club offers information and support for moms with blended families.
There are chats and message boards for members and non-members. The site has a couple of interesting content partners: You Married Him
, for women coping with all the little wonderful and/or bone-headed things husbands are prone to do, and the
Ex-Wives Club, for women who are divorced or in the process of divorcing.
Child safety experts The Paranoid Sisters have an eponymous Web site providing practical advice about keeping children safe in and
outside the home. This well-designed, easy to use site also publishes recall information and a list of online shopping links to vendors of child safety products.
Cybermommy’s next edition (January/February 2000) will focus on Web resources for working and stay-at-home mothers.
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