Join A Parenting Webring For Instant Support

Added: 08/27/2006

Webrings are popping up all over the Internet. Webrings allow Internet surfers to more efficiently surf by linking websites that are of interest to a particular group for a particular reason. They exist on virtually any topic, everything from dance to hiking to reading. For parents, a parenting webring is not only a source of innumerable ideas, but also of a lot of virtual support.

Have you ever been surfing the web on one topic and then realized 40 minutes later that you’re on to a totally different topic and that you’ve passed by a few different topics on the way from where you started to where you are now? Webrings are making this type of surfing a thing of the past. Web surfers have always noticed that surfing the web is exactly that; we surf from one topic to another to another. They must have a common thread somewhere, but it is by no means proof that all of the visited sites are on a similar topic. There is a big difference between having a common topic and having a common thread.

A parenting webring is a webring in which all of the sites are of interest to parents. The important distinction here is that they are not interesting to parents because the parents are people, but interesting to parents because the parents are parents. This means that the common topic of all of the websites within a parenting webring are on the topic of parenting. Some parenting webrings are designed for new parents, with topics such as breastfeeding and co-sleeping, whereas other parenting webrings focus on parents of teenage children or of children going away to college and leaving the parents with an empty nest syndrome. Parents find not only information, but also books and products and inspiration within a parenting webring.

Webrings are designed like a virtual fence on the Internet. This may produce a negative image for you, but webrings are not a virtual fence similar to childproofing your Internet to only allow sites that meet certain content requirements. The fence is a desired thing; desired by websurfers across the world. The Internet has proven to be an extremely vast place, not only for information gathering, but for happening upon unwanted information by mistake. A webring eliminates the need to sift through the hundreds of thousands of Google responses to your keyword query.

For example, on a parenting webring, you will see topics that you might be looking for and a corresponding link. This means that that site is the one recommended by other websurfers just like you (who, again, are looking for parenting information—so they are giving the site a high rating based on the same criteria that you yourself are probably using.)

Joining a parenting webring will allow you to focus your websurfing on the task at hand: finding important information on parenting that will allow you to be a better parent and will also allow you to sleep at night by allaying your fears. This is perhaps the greatest benefit of a parenting webring. Of course, yogis like their webrings so that they can find the best studio or the best mat, but their mat is not going to start a dry cough at 3 AM that’s going to send them to the computer looking for helpful advice to get everyone in the household back to sleep before the alarms start going off.

If you’re looking for the best bottles, the best sleeper sacks, the best swaddlers and the best ways to ‘wear your baby’ (which seems to be the newest fad, as co-sleeping is becoming less of a hot topic), a parenting webring is the best way to find all of these things as well as a little sense of belonging by virtue of searching right alongside moms and dads just like yourselves.

Rate this article:

Bad

Good

Article comments:

No comments for this article yet. Post your comment now!

Return to top of the page