Families: Child Rearing: Good Buddy, Bad Mom

After Carla met Nancy in the elevator of their New York City apartment building two years ago, she was thrilled to have found a bona fide girlfriend, as well as a "mom" friend. Not only could they organize playdates for their 4-year-old daughters, but the two women could also talk about everything from the local downtown art scene to thorny in-law situations.

There was, however, one area in which they disagreed: how to raise kids. Carla (who, like the other women interviewed for this article, didn't want her real name or that of her friend used) watched with alarm as Nancy allowed her daughter to eat fistfuls of sugary snacks and scramble on playground equipment beyond her abilities. To make matters worse, Carla's daughter was beginning to mimic those behaviors. "I didn't know whether to offer my advice or keep my mouth shut," says Carla. She tried to be host of most of the playdates so that she could enforce her rules. But eventually, she says, "I became so uncomfortable with Nancy as a parent that the friendship basically ended."

Relationship experts say one mark of being an adult is the ability to respect the fact that people do things differently. But that's easier said than done when even the best of friends have conflicting approaches to raising children. Take, for example, the case of Elizabeth and Tracy, who met in graduate school in Chicago several years before either became a mother. "We were opinionated, we were feminists, and we always had a lot to talk about," says Elizabeth. When they later became pregnant around the same time, they happily shared books on parenting, agreeing that they both liked the "attachment" approach, a philosophy that promotes families sleeping together wolf-pack style and babies nursing on demand and being carried in slings.

When Elizabeth's son arrived and favored his crib, bottle feeding and a bouncy chair, Tracy made subtly disparaging comments about her friend's abandonment of the attachment techniques. At the same time Elizabeth began to feel that Tracy was keeping her baby in the sling even when the child was wriggling to get down and nursing her when she didn't seem hungry; in her view Tracy was responding not so much to the infant's needs but rather to her own insecurities. The situation finally peaked when Elizabeth mentioned that she had brought her son into her bed while he was sick, and Tracy responded, "Well, I'm so glad to see that you're finally meeting your child's needs." Says Elizabeth: "I was stunned." And hurt. Now a year later, the old friends rarely talk, and when they do, their conversations are formal. "We disagreed about lots of things before we had babies, but we always valued each other's opinions," says Elizabeth. "Now our disagreements feel raw in a way they never did before."

Why should a friend's parenting style be more difficult to accept than, say, her politics? For starters, because there are few things more important than the values we pass on to our children, and parents today, moms in particular, are acutely sensitive about making the right choices. "We live in a society in which mothers are so blamed in general that they become judgmental of mothers who parent differently," says Harriet Lerner, Ph.D., a psychologist and the author of The Dance of Anger: A Woman's Guide to Changing the Patterns of Intimate Relationships (HarperCollins).