Families: Child Rearing: Good Buddy, Bad Mom

Mustering up compassion for fellow moms is often the key to mending rifts over child-rearing differences, according to Ariel Gore, editor of the 'zine Hip Mama. When she was a new, 19-year-old mother with a punk-rock hairdo and what some considered a lenient child-rearing style (it was O.K. for her daughter Maya, now 12, to make a mess at restaurants), Gore faced so much disapproval from other parents that she vowed to keep her parenting opinions to herself. "Some parent-kid behaviors can be hard to watch, but it's tragic that mothers are so unsupportive of each other," she says. "What I really wanted to hear was, 'You seem stressed out--let's go out for coffee.'" Or for a night on the town--without the kids.