Wednesday, June 25, 2008

Parenting websites and talk boards

If you run or use a parenting website or talk board and want to recommend it to others, leave the information in a comment on this blog entry.

And if you find anything that concerns you about the site, also leave a comment.

Our website link page includes links to UK mother support group, international agencies and some other resources that we think people might find useful.

However, we do not link to commercial sites and do not link to other parenting websites, talk boards of individual blogs. This is because we do not have the staff time to monitor the sites to confirm that they do not contain advertising or sponsorship from companies manufacturing products within the scope of the International Code of Marketing of Breastmilk Substitutes. Nor do we want to recommend one forum over another as a source of information.

Instead our link page points to this blog entry and we leave it to you to recommend or otherwise these type of sites. Any commercial ones will be deleted.

3 comments:

Rosemary Cottage said...

I use Mumsnet - www.mumsnet.com - and to be honest, advertising wise it's not *too* bad. They'll not accept anything from Nestle itself (i.e. Nestle branded stuff) BUT there was a bit of a do recently about a L'Oreal advert which they didn't pull. They don't accept formula ads at all.

And it's a fab web site, and there's no bleedin' annoying "tickers" at the bottom (you know, "four years, three months, ten days, five hours, six minutes and 17 seconds since I last went the loo" etc) ... just chat, some parenting related, much general chit chat. Lots of great breastfeeding debates there too, and quite a few breastfeeding counsellors etc give support on there too. Tonnes of peer support as well.

iwantmymum.com said...

Hi
I'm one of the co-founders of http://www.iwantmymum.com

We support and adhere to the World Health Organisation (WHO) International Code of Marketing of Breast Milk Substitutes and the WHO/UNICEF Baby Friendly Hospital Initiative. All links exchanged are checked to ensure code compliancy at the time of listing and regularly re-checked.

iwantmymum is a progressive parenting website which does not promote a particular style of parenting (beyond breastfeeding) but provides evidence based information and a non judgemental forum; to facilitate an informed choice. Our motto is simple: An informed choice is a happy choice!

To this end we provide breastfeeding counsellors from LLL, ABM & NCT to create an online breastfeeding support group; alongside registered midwives, a pharmacist, other health professionals and of course mums and dads.

We don't accept ANY advertising but fund our site via a £1 per month subscription from members; HOWEVER breastfeeding, pregnancy and general chat forums are completely free of charge.

We also have an information section on site, full of articles -including a webchat with Gill Rapley about baby led weaning, breastfeeding premature baby research from Nils Bergman and practical information such as how often should baby nurse and what is the virgin gut.

In addition we recently launched our first community group; Breastfeeding Beyond Babyhood, with the help of Nell McAndrew! This group to support mums breastfeeding infants older than nine months opened in Calderdale, but is soon to roll out Nationwide with other community groups to follow.

Anonymous said...

This one's quite off-topic, but still parenting related. If you've got an open mind, believe in evidence-based approaches and the scientific method you may be interested in this site.

The Parenting Beyond Belief forum was set up by the author of a book of the same name focussed on raising ethical, caring kids without religion.

Most of the contributors are from the US and as you might expect it's not particularly baby-orientated. Here's a quote from a post that I like:
"I do think freethinking parents are much more likely to do the 'fringe' things that challenge the status quo... We find ourselves making choices that often sacrifice convenience and/or that differ from 'mainstream' parenting for the sake of our children's physical and emotional well-being."