DIGITAL-AGE PARENTING Moms @ home online

But the ease of Net resources can boost demands on moms, one expert notes.
By JULIA PRODIS SULEK
KNIGHT RIDDER NEWSPAPERS
SAN JOSE, Calif. -- She cooks a homemade version of Play-Doh. She knows the best place for kids' haircuts. Her electric teakettle is always at the ready while entertaining other moms during play dates. Her husband sends her romantic little notes when he's on business trips.
This stay-at-home mom might seem to be a throwback to 1950s June Cleaver. But with a computer sitting on her kitchen counter, Lia MacDonald, 37, is a thoroughly modern mother. Instead of feeling the isolation of her predecessors, she and scores of women like her are harnessing technology to get connected, empowered and bring new meaning to the home as "command central."
To wit: MacDonald follows the modeling-clay recipe from the computer screen while stirring flour and cream of tartar on her stove. She punches in the Yahoo.com Yellow Pages to get directions to Balloon Cuts for kids, and she shopped online for the teakettle. Her husband isn't hand-scripting love letters; he's sending instant messages from London, where he has set up Web cams at his office and at home to watch his wife and two children make breakfast in the mornings.
"It has made information so easy to obtain, it makes life much more satisfying for me," said MacDonald, who bought her first computer in 1996 while she was a fourth-grade teacher. "If the kids ask me, 'How do snails have babies?' I'm one of those people who thinks 'computer' first."
Tech-minded
Here in the Silicon Valley, mothers who are often former techies themselves or married to them are equally addicted to their computers, orchestrating their households online. Keeping track of soccer practices and doctor's appointments? Palm Desktop. Stubborn cranberry juice stain in the rug? www.a2zcarpet.com. Constipated baby? www.babycenter.com.
Like the advent of the washing machine and dishwasher decades ago, home computers -- as well as cell phones and handheld computers -- make women's hectic lives easier.
"The computer has sort of replaced the coffee klatch, in my opinion. You can go to Google instead of Grandma as a great resource," said Ame Mahler Beanland, 32, of Pleasanton, Calif., who has a 2-year-old daughter and works as a writer from home. "Whether you want to read about vaccinating your children or the cheapest place for a plane ticket to shopping for furniture -- it's amazing."
Computer industry experts might call MacDonald and Beanland "abundantly connected," and "early adopters" of technology. Indeed, not only did MacDonald meet her husband through Match.com in 1996, she even conceived their two children, now 4 and 2, with the help of an online conception calendar, www.babymed.com, to determine the dates of peak fertility.
Raising expectations
Although the benefits of technology to mothers is clear, experts and mothers are quick to realize the downside.
"Yes, she is empowered to do all these things with technology, but the flip side is, she must do all these things," said Jan English-Lueck, a cultural anthropologist at San Jose State University and researcher with the Silicon Valley Cultures Project there.
Another drawback is that expectations for mothers are raised by the ability to be constantly productive online and to produce quickly.
"It gives you flexibility, but it comes at a hidden cost, and that cost is often borne by the mother," English-Lueck said.
Beanland, who works from home part time, is the first to admit the seductive allure of the computer.
"I think it's easy to get caught up in the machine. I get up with this frantic need to check my e-mail," she said. "Just have your computer not work or your printer not work, you'd think you had your arm amputated. I hate the dependency on it. I'm striving to strike a balance where I don't want it to be so necessary that without it, it sends me into a nervous breakdown."
Network of friends
On the other hand, she sees her e-mail network of friends and family in very old-fashioned terms.
"It's almost Victorian in nature. They used to write letters to each other. Women would share their thoughts and correspond. When I reframed it that way, out of the context of the cold, remote cyberworld, it began to make sense to me," said Beanland, who cowrote "It's a Chick Thing" in 2000 about women's friendships. "I had newfound respect for women who connect and support one another via the computer."
Nandita Gupta, a Palo Alto, Calif., mother of two, is a member of the Mothers' Club of Palo Alto and Menlo Park that keeps about 600 local mothers connected through an e-mail network, www.pampmothersclub.org.
"Anytime I need a recommendation from a plumber to a nanny, you name it, I go to the mothers club," said Gupta, 31, who was laid off from her job as a product manager last year and has since had her second child. "My mother is here and I do value her opinion, but my mother is just one person."
In print?
Lia MacDonald's own ambivalence about the cyberworld came full circle when her husband's elderly relatives visited from Scotland. One of them made a comment about the lack of books in their home.
"That's embarrassing to me to think we don't have a lot of books. I realized it's not that we don't read, but we read a lot from the Internet; we get our news from the Internet," she said. "When we were growing up, everyone had the Encyclopaedia Britannica on two shelves. We don't have that. There was something about that that hit me."
To assuage her guilty conscience, she joined a book club. And although she is reading more paperbound books than ever, she still relies on her computer to get them.
"I will go online and see which library has the book that I need," she said. "I have it sent to the Rosegarden Library, and I pick it up a few days later."