Link up with point 'n' click

A virtual parenting-support network? Yes, the next big thing, it seems. One of the recurring themes of parenting throughout the latter part of the 20th century was the breakdown of community and extended-family support for parents.

Increasingly, Mum and Dad found they had no one to turn to for advice.

The first-time parents next door on the isolated-sprawling-urbane-state-with-no-amenities were just as bewildered by the babies' incessant crying, the toddlers' tantrums, the five-year-olds' horror of school.

The era of the parenting guru dawned. The parenting-books market boomed, videos and television programmes on parenting became very popular, parenting courses took off, and, finally, parents' groups mushroomed around the western world, Ireland included.

Only a few short months into the 21st century and, if anything, it's even harder for parents. Your next-door neighbours, Celtic cubs consumed by work and commuting, probably know more about ashtanga yoga than disposable nappies, and may even be assuming babies are a luxury they'll never be able to afford.

But the same facility which will connect us all as one happy global economy looks set to save despairing parents and offer a global family support system. It's the big "e" of course.

E-mailing, e-shopping, even e-banking are concepts most parents will have some sort of familiarity with.

And now, e-parenting. Surfing the Internet for tips on child-rearing started happening in the States, and to a lesser extent here and in Britain, a few years ago. Now you can get information on just about every child-related topic there is.

A new Irish site launched last month, rollercoaster.ie, promises not only a diverse range of advice and links, but also a source of information on the concerns, aspirations and attitudes of today's parents. Anne O'Connor, a child clinical psychologist with more than a decade's experience working with children and their families, is behind this new development.

"I had used the Internet myself to look up parenting issues for my own child," she says. "I was mainly checking out American parenting sites and I found them very informative.

"Then I decided to put up information on pre-schoolers and sleep. I used to run a sleep clinic for pre-schoolers and I found the information out there for parents was very dogmatic. "Parents seemed to need a more balanced view, so I started putting up different perspectives on a site. Then I realised that I had an awful lot of information which might be useful. About a year ago the idea for RollerCoaster started rumbling."

With her husband John Feeley, founder of the Irish Jobs page, Ireland's first recruitment site (acquired by Denis O'Brien of Esat fame last year), O'Connor founded RollerCoaster, a title meant to encapsulate the ups and downs of parenting.

"I think we would have about 100 hits a day so far," says O'Connor, "but it's very hard to be accurate because it's so new. I am very happy with how it's going though; people are responding, and responding very positively. They email queries, and participate in our survey and parents' poll, and there is clearly huge potential for this site."

At the moment the site consists of 15 different pages covering issues like sleep, childcare, nutrition, discipline, family finance and family motoring. Family motoring??

"The motoring site is very popular," laughs O'Connor. "Motoring sites in general are very popular on the Internet, and there are all sorts of things to look at when parents set off in the car on a journey," she explains. "The site is for parents, but particularly parents who use the Internet. Research indicates that women are increasingly becoming Internet users, and that the first computer-literate generation, who would now be in the 30 to 40 age groups, are becoming parents."

The information on RollerCoaster should prove useful to a lot of those parents. It is currently aimed at parents of children under five, but there are a lot of plans in the offing.

"We're very ambitious and we can see a lot of scope for developing the site," says O'Connor. "We're looking at school age and teenager-related sites at the moment.

"I've almost completed a section on speech and language. We're developing a pregnancy-and-birth site, one on summer holidays, and a noticeboard for up and coming events which would be of interest to parents and ones for children.

"We also want to develop discussion pages, to provide a forum where parents share information based on their experience with each other.

"But we need to do lots of research, and talk to lots of people. Anything I wouldn't have expertise on I get a professional in the area to write about. It all takes a lot of time and co-ordination."

O'Connor sums up: "The whole point of the site is to provide something which is practical and commonsensical and which covers issues that are relevant to people's lives."