April 22, 1999
LIBRARY / SITES FOR NEW PARENTS
Dr. Spock Yields to the World Wide Web
By ERIC NAGOURNEY
hat's a new parent to do?
Dr. Spock has been knocked
off his pedestal by posthumous pans of his real-life fathering.
Dr. T. Berry Brazelton, as dear to
many parents' hearts as was Dr.
Spock, is locked in battle with his fellow best-selling child-raising author,
John Rosemond, over toilet training,
of all things. And from somewhere in
your apartment rises a wail that,
with luck, might belong to a rousing
velociraptor -- but is more likely
coming from the lungs of a far fiercer creature: your baby.
As the icons of child rearing fall by
the wayside or into professional
squabbles, where can a new parent
(the ""desperate"" goes without saying) still find authoritative, unimpeachable advice on everything from
bed-wetting to bedlam?
The Web, of course. No, seriously.
Granted, as has often been noted,
digging out reliable information
from the Internet is a little iffier than
hitting the advice section of a bookstore, thumbing through hand-me-down books or asking a relative who
has actually done this before. There
is, after all, some fairly strange stuff
sitting on all those servers out there.
When your 4-month-old suddenly refuses to take her bottle, you don't
want your search engine to send you
to some site revealing that a guerrilla team of highly trained babies
knocked Flight 800 out of the sky
with a barrage of diaper bombs.
But there are a host of Web sites
with sound information intended for
new parents, from those still cooing
at fuzzy-gazed newborns to those
who spend the day coaxing toddlers
off the bookshelves. Of course, how a
new parent would find the time to
spend on the Internet is a little hard
to figure.
Most sites offer a range of advice
on topics like baby names, feeding,
child-development milestones and
sleep habits. As far as this goes, they
don't offer much advantage over a
book. But Web sites, with their ability
to be quickly updated, allow parents
to keep abreast of breaking news on
the baby front, including new health
studies, the latest thinking on various
child-rearing issues and product
warnings about child accessories
like cribs and car seats.
And of course, the sites allow new
parents (and veterans) to exchange
tips -- or just gripe -- on bulletin
boards and in chat rooms. Some sites
also allow you to customize their
home pages to your needs, if you are
willing to part with a fair amount of
personal information.
All that can be fairly reassuring
stuff to a new parent struggling to
get his or her bearings. The slew of
ads peppering the more successful
Web sites also offer their own peculiar form of reassurance. On those
days when you feel convinced that no
parent could be less competent than
you, hop online and take heart: you
are no loser. On the contrary, you are
suddenly very popular. You have just
gone from being a consumer to a superconsumer (not to mention being
the owner-operator of someone who
soon will be fueling the economy with
his own purchases), and a lot of big
companies want you to know just
how much they care.
All of which suggests that new parents searching for help online should
exercise caution. The baby-advice
sites offer especially good examples
of the challenge of evaluating information on the Web. In this case, on
the well-established sites, it is often
not so much a question of assessing
the trustworthiness of the information as trying to figure out if you are
reading an objective piece of advice
or a skillfully devised ad. Sometimes
it is hard even to figure out who is
running a site.
That said, with a little common
sense, most parents will be able to
find something of value on the Web.
They can even find information from
some child-raising authors who first
made their name in books.
Dr. Benajamin Spock, who died
last year, did some writing for the
Web site Parenttime.com, and material from him can still be found
there (if only he had thought to prepare a defense of his personal life,
criticized in a biography that appeared after his death). Dr. Brazelton appears, among other places, on
Babycenter.com, where (sponsored
by a popular disposable diaper) he
can espouse his philosophy that parents should not rush to toilet-train
their children. Rosemond, a conservative who argues for early training (and criticizes Dr. Brazelton for
accepting diaper-industry money),
has his own site.
Still, with all the sites out there,
none reviewed here seemed able to
answer a basic question: Why do
parents need a Web site to figure out
babies, when babies seem to figure
out their parents just fine on their
own?
Here are some other Web sites of interest to new parents:
PARENTHUB.COM: www.parenthub.com
The site evaluates other child-rearing sites and lists links, stores, groups and companies.
KIDSHEALTH.ORG: www.kidshealth.org
An award-winning site covering
a wide range of physical and emotional health information concerning
children.
BABIESONLINE.COM: www.babiesonline.com
Links to sites and free services, including electronic birth announcements and e-mail greetings.
MOJO'S MUSICAL MOUSEUM: www.kididdles.com/mouseum/index.html
At
2 A.M., you're trying to sing baby back to sleep. Lost in the haze is the
verse after ""mockingbird."" The lyrics section of this site is for you.