It takes a village to raise children, and Sarah Carzoli’s is a big one. It stretches from her home in Crystal Lake, Ill., to Australia, Paris, London, Canada, Israel and Milwaukee.
She joined the online group of parents she calls “her moms” on Mother’s Day 1996. They’ve shared bottle battles, potty training, sleep deprivation, divorce and death across glowing screens that have sometimes brought them closer to women they may never have met in person than the folks next door.
“I would leave my daughter with any of these women in a heartbeat,” Carzoli says. Their group was the leading edge of what has blossomed into a key part of parenting in some circles: the electronic mailing list, or listserv.
In many cities and neighborhoods across the country, these e-mail groups are creating — or re-creating — supportive and sometimes intimate connections of the kind that once happened over the backyard fence or at the local coffee klatch. They’re giving new parents the on-the-ground knowledge they need to cope with everything from what stroller to buy to dealing with potential child predators, says Liliana Lengua, a professor of child psychology at the University of Washington.
Born on Playgrounds
Yahoo and Google groups, which are free and easy to set up, are a popular place to put listservs. Gannett, which owns USA TODAY, offers dozens of free MomsLikeMe.com lists in 40 states. Though across-the-board numbers aren’t available, there are thousands of lists nationwide with tens of thousands of members.
Search “parents” on Yahoo alone, and 79,530 different groups come up. Some are very specific, such as groups for parents of children with autism (14,639 members).
But the vast majority are simply local parents, most of them mothers, who hear about a group at the playground, sign up and start chatting. They can be small — the East Atlanta…