“Ten years ago, these divides didn’t happen,” she said. Suddenly, Sutton felt supported in her parenting decisions-and entrenched in a camp. She explained that, with the encouragement of Facebook friends, she had taken a series of small, reasonable-seeming steps-co-sleeping, nursing more frequently-that had snowballed into full-blown attachment parenting. “I feel like I’ve been radicalized,” Sutton said. “How did people parent before Facebook?” Sharoni Erbst, a tanned stay-at-home mom with nearly one-year-old twins, asked. Nursing their drinks, the women reflected on the role of social media in motherhood. The final what-ifs were tabled for next time. “ ‘Frozen’ princess is on the clock,” Chesters said. “What are the ethics of using you as an example?” Sutton said. (“Day care’s worst nightmare!” she said.) Woodin doesn’t allow her one-year-old daughter to eat sugar. “I would tell my best friend,” said Catherine Woodin, a lawyer and child advocate. Let’s sit down and discuss what it means to be fair.’ ” Her daughter has other concerns: “She’ll be wanting to share something with her brother, and then she’ll eat it.” With her son, “everything now is ‘That’s not fair!’ So I’m, like, ‘Sorry, Hugo, you’ve come to the wrong mommy. “Now, that looks like something I’m going to need later on,” she added, eying another mom’s cosmopolitan.Ĭhesters confided that her children were already grappling with their own ethical quandaries. Chesters was wearing large, dangling earrings and a loose print dress. “If it all goes badly, we’ll just order lots of champagne and turn ‘The Bachelorette’ on,” she said, cheerfully, as the women settled near the window and ordered drinks. She’d left him in the care of a babysitter who also works as a for-hire Disney princess. Chesters herself nearly had to cancel, after Hugo got trapped in an elevator that afternoon. Of the seventy women who’d R.S.V.P.’d, six straggled into the bar. In fact, the biggest obstacles to civil dialogue proved to be flaky spouses and childcare mishaps. In a post on UWS Mommas, a Facebook group for Upper West Side parents, Chesters proposed a series of in-person ethics salons “where you get to hash things out and it’s not so nasty.” Though who was she kidding? She admitted, shortly before the event, “I see them being an absolute bunfight”-a term Australians use for when people become so angry that they begin flinging buns at one another. “When someone’s just selling baby furniture, I’m, like, ‘Eh.’ ” “It’s like watching ‘The Real Housewives,’ ” she said. Part of the attraction, she confessed, came from guilty pleasure. The event was convened by Sarah Chesters, an Australian ethics professor turned interior designer and mother (to Hugo, four, and Heidi, fourteen months), who had found herself riveted by the heated debates in online parenting forums. But what happens when they disagree? On a recent evening, six women and one baby gathered at Beacon Bar, on the Upper West Side, to discuss the morally fraught business of parenthood.
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