The Family Channel

It doesn't take much to unleash the perennial stay-at-home vs. working-mom debate -- such as the recent posting of a study that compares how different moms spend their days, hour by hour.

There have also been explosive debates about choosing whether to deliver a baby in a Catholic hospital and, of course, breast-feeding vs. formula-feeding.

A flurry of accusatory messages fly back and forth, apologies are demanded and then finally someone begs fellow list members to move on to the next topic.

"We aren't as supportive as we could be," said Amy De Groff of Silver Spring, the full-time working mom of a 3-year-old and an 18-month-old. Some moms appear to over-defend their choices because they doubt them themselves, she said. And it's easier to be rude online. "You're not looking at the face of the woman you're hurting," she said.

There are other reasons why all is not idyllic in the world of DC Urban Moms. As with any online community that gathers a critical mass of users, there have been growing pains such as spammers and commercial enterprises that see the list's members as prospective customers. Steele and Sokurashvili have set up content filters to block some advertising-type messages; they manually reject others. (You can ask for a recommendation of a yoga class, housekeeper and so on, but you can't advertise such services.) Steele said this battle is tough, because some commercial information is useful. But he doesn't want the list to be taken over by ads.

Like all Internet ventures, DC Urban Moms has to deal with the privacy issue.

After one woman claimed a weekly newspaper had quoted her directly from the list without permission, Steele and Sokurashvili added a line at the bottom of every posting that says a message may not be republished without the writer's knowledge.

Steele and Sokurashvili said another woman reported being "fired" by her pediatrician after she posted a critical comment about the doctor's practice on the list. Steele said several people have asked him to erase their identifying e-mail addresses in the archives, which he has done.

The moderators say a growing number of members are dropping subscriptions to which their names are attached and then re-subscribing under assumed names. Longtime members of DC Urban Moms hope the new anonymity won't dull the sense of community, the feeling of chatting over cups of coffee rather than over a high-speed Internet line.

Stein said the group has been so vital to her that when her husband, son and daughter were simultaneously throwing up recently, her immediate impulse was to go online and ask a fellow DC Urban Mom to come over and help. That probably wasn't going to work, but it did give her a laugh at a tough moment.

Divide and Grow

Fathers, who have been mostly silent observers from the start, recently weighed in to DC Moms, saying they wanted to be part of the conversation. Sokurashvili and Steele, a stay-at-home dad for more than a year, welcomed them to the fray.

As the group has grown, it has spun off a slew of sub-communities: working moms, part-time working moms, moms working at home, over-40 new moms, moms trying to wean babies, German-speaking moms and newly divorced moms. This has encouraged bonding and helped reduce some friction.