By Ginger S., from the Moms Network

If you had to guess, how many moms in the U.S. do you think go online more than once a day? (Skip down to the end of this blog for your answer, and I’d love to know how many of you were close! Comment me!)

I go online about a half-dozen times a day (or night) myself. Most of it is for my work, but about 30 percent of the time I’m reading news stories and visiting my favorite online communities to see who’s discussing, dishing and dissing.

Last week I happened upon a group of brand-spanking-new moms who were chatting as fast as their fingers could fly. Man! I wish there were online websites when my son was a baby. I can remember being the only one awake in my house either because I couldn’t fall asleep after a 2 a.m. feeding or because I was worrying about some strange new-baby symptom.  It would have been great to have someone to talk to other than the nurse at the Scottish Rite hotline who I think knew my voice by heart. Today, moms just go to their favorite online community and they can pretty much bet there is a bleary-eyed mom (or millions of ’em) on the other end already engaged in dozens of conversations about bottles vs. breast; rice milk vs. soy, feeding or treating a fever – all kinds of forums, chat rooms and message boards for moms to talk to each other, get advice and simply connect with a kindred spirit who also happens to be up in the middle of the night.

So fast-forward 12 years and here I am, thrilled that there are dozens of online sites for parents of adolescents and teens. On my favorite sites I’ve asked other moms dozens of questions about the roller coaster ride of hormones, the survival techniques for homework blues, and the “is this normal” questions that come up all the time. Soon I imagine myself once again awake in the middle of the night, worried about my son who is out past his curfew and isn’t answering his cell phone. Who am I going to call at that hour? Why, I’ll go online to Parents & Company or theantidrug.com or Teendriving.com and find some other moms in some other states also up at 1 a.m. worrying over their kids. And I bet we’d all rather be worried about a diaper rash, don’t you think? 

Sure, I could call one of my close girlfriends or my sister, but why wake them at this hour with what will hopefully turn out to be nothing? And I admit, there is something comfortingly anonymous about talking to women I’ve never seen and probably will never meet about a topic that could make me feel judged or embarrassed. (“What do you mean you don’t know where your kid is? What kind of mom are you?” “Well, I thought he was sleeping over your son’s house…”)

So while I’ll always be glad for face-to-face, hearts-to-hearts, the wisdom shared during my Girl’s Nights Out, the inspiration of PTA parenting workshops and the current event conversations around the “water cooler,” I gotta say that I hope online social communities are here to stay. I look forward to the inventions of Generation Next or Now or whatever they’re called, who have grown up on MySpace and Facebook, and who will surely dream up new and creative ways for us all to connect. And I will ask my son to explain it all to me and hook me up from my room with a view in whatever beachside city to which I retire. Just maybe I’ll see him online one day, up in the middle of the night, asking if anyone knows about some party his daughter said she was going to … and I’ll message him back and tell him not to worry, and if he’d like, he can pick up the phone and call his mom no matter what time it is.

Answer: 61 million moms go online more than once a day

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 16th, 2007 at 4:38 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.