Every month, 40,000 people log on to Irish parenting website rollercoaster.ie to talk about everything from tantrums to morning sickness. Louise Holden reports

Anne O'Connor, a child clinical psychologist, has spent the past four years building up an Internet community of parents through her website, rollercoaster.ie. She used to run a sleep clinic for pre-schoolers in Dublin before moving to the west of Ireland with her husband and two-year-old son.

"I felt the Internet could be the right medium for my consultancy work when I moved from the city," says O'Connor. "I began to research how parents use the Internet for information and support. The parenting website format was already well established in the US, and the time was right to create a website especially for Irish parents."

In March, 2000, rollercoaster.ie was born. O'Connor started with 60 articles she had written on the subject of early childhood and asked work contacts to contribute articles on their experiences as social workers, dieticians and speech and language therapists.

"A year later, I introduced the discussion boards and that's when the site really took off. Web forums are the perfect environment for parents to share ideas, to get to the heart of problems and to offer support. Some of the discussions are real eye-openers for me. We now have 10,000 messages per month - it's a challenge monitoring every conversation, but with our staff of three we do our best."

People use the boards for very practical matters - many have problems concerning the disciplining of their children, or getting them to sleep or eat, so they post up a message and wait for more experienced parents to come back with solutions. "People are very willing to help. There's a real community feel to the forums," says O'Connor. Areas for discussion on the site include behaviour, pre-teens, nutrition, education and money.

There is also an area just for dads, but traffic has been light so far. "Many of the people posting messages on the 'Just for Dads' section are women looking for a male point of view. We'd like to encourage more men onto the site, however. It's a great resource for dads who may be primary carers or who are taking care of their children part time. They can often feel isolated."

The success of parenting websites such as rollercoaster.ie and the other popular Irish site eumom.com is that they give anxious parents a chance to work through issues with other parents who are at the same stage.

"This generation of parents has so many questions about raising children because we have so much more understanding of how important childhood is," says O'Connor. "We are learning how experiences in early childhood can shape behaviour and attitudes in adulthood. This is a scary prospect for parents. We are aware of how important this job is and we don't want to get it wrong."

Previous generations had less access to information, which in many ways made the job of parenting easier, says O'Connor. "We get a flurry of conflicting advice on every topic from discipline to food to sleep. . . However, they may have no friends or neighbours with children whose advice they can seek. They need to talk to people with experience. Sometimes they want anonymity as well. The web provides that."

The other challenge for parents today, according to O'Connor, is that they feel they must have a greater input into the leisure time of children than their own parents had. "When we were growing up we were allowed to roam about the place - in the summer we'd leave the house in the morning and ramble around with friends outside until sunset. Now parents are more protective and can't run the risk of letting children wander into danger. It's very difficult to find safe activities that allow free play. It's new ground for all of us and it helps if parents can explore it together."

It's no wonder that parents are less confident than they used to be as many of the old reliable techniques of parenting just don't suit any more.

"Judging from our usage figures, it seems as if the majority of our users are women at work," says O'Connor. "We have a surge of hits at lunchtime on weekdays. People stay on the site for an average of nine minutes and most head straight for the discussion boards. We have 40,000 unique visitors per month."

That's 40,000 parents, mostly women, logging on from desks around the country to ask about mysterious rashes, sudden changes in toddler sleep patterns and 13-year-olds insisting on tattoos. It's a brave new world of parenting.