The Family Channel
DC Urban Moms Online: Click for Support, Advice, Home Remedies, Gossip, Political Rants

By Shannon Henry
Special to The Washington Post
Tuesday, May 3, 2005

While 4-year-old Michael spins circles around the toy-filled living room and 4-month-old Evan bounces in a baby seat, Mom and Dad peer at the screens of nearly identical silver PowerBook computers. Maria Sokurashvili and Jeff Steele, home for the evening after work, are tending to their other baby -- the online parenting support group called DC Urban Moms.

Sokurashvili, 33, is from Georgia, in the former Soviet Union. Steele, 41, is from Illinois. The two met when Steele was in Georgia working on an Internet project. Like many young people from other places who settle in the Washington area and start families, they had no handy network of relatives to provide help and advice. As veterans of the high-tech world, they naturally saw the Internet as a solution.

They started modestly, launching DC Urban Moms in 2001 as a way for a group of about 20 friends to share advice and make plans. As more people signed up (at http://www.dcurbanmom.com/ ; note that "mom" is singular, the result of a registration error) to receive daily e-mails, the group swelled to include parents of multiples, gay moms and dads, single parents and pregnant women. In 2002, the group's members sent 200 messages per month. Today that number is over 2,000. The list has 5,500 members.

In a time when many people complain about not knowing their neighbors, DC Urban Moms has become a virtual village, a version of the community that some people think is needed to raise children. It has also become a window into what thrills and irks Washington mothers and fathers.

At DC Moms you can pose a question -- about what to do when your child can't sleep, won't eat or simply has too much stuff -- and receive dozens of replies within the day. One member recently asked where she could find chocolate geckos and got half a dozen suggestions.

In some circles, "the list" has replaced baby books as the main way moms -- and it is mostly moms although dads participate, too -- seek practical advice. It's quick, interactive and loaded with diverse opinions. It's entertaining and controversial, and frequently both. It's a flea market, a bulletin board and a 24-hour advice line.

But it's also a forum for spirited, heated, philosophical exchange on controversial topics, such as the decisions to have only one child, stay at home with the kids, return to work, breast-feed, raise kids as vegetarians and home-school.

"It's a safe place to vet a question without having your husband think you're nuts or annoying the nurse in your pediatrician's office or feeling judged by a mother or mother-in-law," said Karen Montagne of Arlington, the mother of a 2½-year-old and a 7-month-old and vice president of a business group. She calls the list a "collective women's instinct."

Many DC Urban Moms say they read the list instead of watching television. Some say they've become addicted to following certain threads and reading posts from regular contributors who have almost become characters in a family drama. Sagas such as potty training, deciding when is the best time of year to have a child and even when to report suspected child abuse are all closely followed.

"Who needs soap operas?" said Tricia Duncan, the at-home mother of a 6-month-old who lives in D.C.'s Palisades neighborhood. She said she and her Arlington sister-in-law regularly say to each other, "Did you read the one about . . . ?"

Addicted to Momming

Lynn Anne Miller of Bethesda said she lately has been trying to curb what her husband calls "DC Urban Momming" -- the hours spent reading, replying to and forwarding e-mails. Miller's husband refers to himself as a "DC Urban Widower."

"It can become an obsession," she admitted.

Miller, who has a 2½-year-old and works part time, said she doesn't ask her own mom for advice because, at 81, she doesn't remember the new-baby stage very well -- nor did she have to worry over such modern issues as hiring a nanny or choosing a car seat.

Miller said that, like many list members, she keeps up with some people she knows in real life largely by reading their postings online. "There's a strange, new-millennium feel when I see a post from a friend saying she's sick," Miller said.

Sarah Zapolsky of Alexandria posted a note on the list to create a play group for her 8-month-old son. She found a group of people who lived within several blocks of her home, all with first kids within three weeks of her son's birthday. "Sad to say, I never would have met my neighbors any other way," she said. "It's the new backyard fence."

Sarah Jones, Washington mother to a 5-year-old, a 2-year-old and a newborn, has used the list to find a nanny -- and then locate a new job for the nanny when Jones decided to stop working. When she found she couldn't breast-feed, she received 40 or 50 e-mails with advice and support.

But it was another posting that got the biggest response. Jones had just given birth to her third child when she began chemotherapy for breast cancer. Her query: How do you handle parenting when you are really too tired?

"I decided to go to DC Urban Moms because, definitely, 5,000 heads are better than one," said Jones.

Dozens of suggestions poured in to her: Ask for help. Rent musical videos like "Annie," "The Sound of Music" and "Mary Poppins." Do a hand-shadow show. Set up a small child-proofed area with everything you need for the day so you don't have to move around the house much. Have tea parties in bed. Take long baths. Some women wrote with stories about what it was like when they were children and their mothers had cancer.

Now in the midst of treatment, Jones makes use of the tips. But she especially values the advice about not putting too much pressure on herself to be a perfect mom while battling the disease. It was a validation of what she knew, she said, but she wanted to hear it from other people anyway.

One of the list's most prolific contributors, Sheryl Stein of Arlington (better known to DC Urban Moms by her e-mail name "wrekehavoc") found that she felt isolated and alone after having children, and she questioned many of her choices. Most of her friends didn't have kids and parenting books offered conflicting advice.

"I wigged myself out so much that I got shingles," said Stein, who works as a Web manager for a think tank and has a 6-year-old and a 23-month-old. Now she's realized that many of her concerns -- about her daughter not gaining enough weight, her own trouble with nursing -- are serious and difficult, but typical.

And she's relieved. "We're all struggling with a lot of the same stuff," she said.

Enter the Fray

While many moms have been bolstered by DC Urban Moms, some find the opinions too judgmental and the fights too catty.

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.

Meagan Jeronimo, a legal secretary and mother of a 20-month-old, launched the separate DC Working Moms group in 2004 after the DC Urban Moms list became too unwieldy for her.

She was also annoyed at what she felt was a stay-at-home slant to the list, saying that many of the moms had set up play groups through the list that met during working hours. "I'm lost here," she remembers thinking about managing work and motherhood. "I want to talk to someone who's going through this."

DC Working Moms now has more than 500 members and meets in different places around the city for mid-week lunches without the kids. The site also has a database for women who have their own businesses, and the members have begun doing some grassroots lobbying--promoting, for example, increased public support for child care.

Really Now

For Steele and Sokurashvili, who have day jobs in the technology industry, DC Urban Moms is what the Internet used to be before commercial interests took over. Though many people have sold or bought things through the group, the couple has not made any money.

"Appreciation is enough," deadpans Steele. It's true, he said, that their server gets so overloaded they may need to buy a faster computer soon. They've debated putting a voluntary contribution option on the site, as many Web logs have.

But for now, the couple is enjoying what has become a Washington family channel, a reality show of sorts, and learning from the postings. The couple tries to let the members steer the conversation and fight their own battles whenever possible. "We are in the background," said Sokurashvili.

Steele, who said he is not the kind of father who would ever have picked up a parenting book, said what he's learned from the list makes it worth the work. He uses the archives as a "mini-Google" to find information about charter schools, birthday party activities and family friendly restaurants.

And, of course, DC Urban Moms provides the couple with another key benefit: entertainment. "It's what we talk about in the evening," said Sokurashvili. ·

Shannon Henry has covered technology in Washington for the past 10 years, most recently for The Washington Post's Business section. She is working on a book about motherhood.