Your Mac can't help with the 2 a.m. feeding, but it can make the process of being a parent a little easier.
Victoria Von Biel
PEOPLE WITHOUT KIDS don't really understand the one central truth of most parents' lives: The moment the little line on the pregnancy test turns pink, moms and dads start a trip that leads to some pretty strange destinations. I'm not talking Barcelona or Bali here. I'm talking the Polly Pocket aisle at Toys "R" Us, Raffi concerts, hospital emergency rooms, and vicious peewee soccer games.
Suddenly you need information on previously undreamed-of topics. Where to turn? To your Mac, of course. Through the magic of CD-ROMs and modems, you can consult Mayo Clinic pediatricians, absorb the child-care wisdom of T. Berry Brazelton, and -- best of all -- kvetch endlessly with other parents.
First Things First
It's only the beginning of your journey, but pregnancy may be the strangest part of the whole parental experience. To help you along the way, try Nine Month Miracle (Rating: Acceptable (3 of 5 mice); $40), from ADAM Software (800-755-2326 or 404-980-0888). This CD-ROM explores fetal development, using video, pictures, and animations. You can check out male and female anatomy, watch videos of procedures such as amniocentesis, and even observe a birth. An excellent index lets you go straight to the area that interests you most.
Nine Month Miracle is not just for adults. A wonderful section called Emily's New Sister teaches little children all about how a baby develops. Parents who are squeamish about some of the disc's contents (such as the birth video) can invoke a "fig leaf" option to protect innocent eyes from the more graphic material.
This CD-ROM has a couple of drawbacks, the worst being the "hosts," Adam and Eve. Just pray that you're never trapped in an elevator with this perky twosome, whose cute banter -- pregnant readers, take note -- can induce serious nausea. Drawback No. 2 is that this disc is slow. Even with a Power Mac, you're going to spend lots of time listening to the compact disc spin and the hard disk churn -- teaching you the kind of patience expectant parents need in spades once Junior is born.
Another, less helpful program for expectant and new parents is Ready, Set, Grow (Rating: Poor (2 of 5 mice); $40), from IMSI (415-454-7101). This HyperCard-based program lets you count down to your due date via a "biological clock," alerts you to potential genetic risks, and even predicts what your child will look like (very cheesy). Once your baby is born, you can record all the "firsts" (smiles, steps, and so on), track height and weight, keep medical records on file, and look up common childhood ailments. I wouldn't rely on Ready, Set, Grow's not very current medical advice, though, and the interface is a joke. Its heart is in the right place, but it's just not the computerized baby book the world is waiting for.
Paging Dr. Spock
Once you get home from the hospital and realize there are no doctors or nurses on hand to help you with your adorable, helpless new being, a computerized medical encyclopedia starts to seem like a very good thing. Mayo Clinic Family Health (Rating: Very Good (4 of 5 mice); $80), from IVI Publishing (800-754-1484 or 612-996-6000), is a truly excellent CD-ROM for new parents. Filled with sensible advice on such topics as breast feeding and new-baby care, it's also a good general health reference for the whole family. Look up side effects of medications, check out mysterious symptoms, and find out how to improve your family's health through diet and exercise. With Mayo Clinic doctors behind the content and built-in links to health references on the Internet via Netscape Navigator, this CD-ROM is both trustworthy and reassuring.
If all you want are the cold, hard anatomical facts, then BodyWorks 4.0 (Rating: Very Good (4 of 5 mice); $50), from Softkey (800-227-5609 or 617-494-1200), is the program for you. This program uses speech, music, photos, diagrams, and movies to graphically illustrate how the human body operates. It has a good section on pregnancy, which explains in fairly technical language exactly how the fetus grows, and it also provides lots of general anatomy information. As dry and academic as this CD-ROM can be, it's still quite fascinating. And since all the medical terms and anatomically correct drawings are well indexed, clicking on an unfamiliar term or illustration takes you straight to the medical dictionary.
Advice and More Advice
None of these programs deliver what most parents need: operating instructions. How do you toilet-train a toddler who thinks the potty is a good place to store Tonka Toys? What do you do when your six-year-old refuses to go to school? And how do you stop your ten-year-old from becoming an e-mail pal with a 40-something unemployed truck driver from Dubuque?
The closest you'll ever get to a user manual is the other parents you'll find online. For information on anything from baby names to teenage discipline, visit Family Forum (GO Family), on CompuServe; Parenting magazine (keyword: Parenting Magazine), on America Online; or Parents Interactive Network (keyword: PIN), also on AOL. I can't guarantee that the advice will be any better than what your mother would give you (and in some cases, it will be a lot weirder), but there's comfort in knowing you're not alone.
The Web also has some good places to brush up on parenting skills. One of the best is Family Planet (http://family.starwave.com), a nicely designed and well-edited online magazine, with daily news stories, syndicated columns from such luminaries as Dr. T. Berry Brazelton, child-care articles, children's-TV reviews, and lists of other parenting resources on the net. Parents Place (http//:www.parentsplace.com) has less glitz than Family Planet but a tad more charm. It pulls together various resources on the Web -- catalogs, discussion groups, and so on -- and presents them with down-to-earth commentary.
Controlling Your Kids
There's no question that the Web is a wonderful resource for parents, but it becomes a headache once your children are old enough to log on themselves. They want to make new friends in alt.grunge.megadeth; you want them to be looking up the gross national product of Bolivia in Britannica Online.
Unfortunately, Fresh Software Company's Time's Up!, a program that lets parents set time limits for computer use, isn't yet available for the Mac. Parents must rely instead on Prodigy and AOL's fairly effective Parental Controls, which let you decide where on these services your kids can go.
You can also limit access to the Net with SurfWatch, one of the first programs to be released in response to last year's mass hysteria about child porn online. SurfWatch (Rating: Very Good/Outstanding (4.5 of 5 mice), $50; monthly updates, $6 each; 800-458-6600 or 415-948-9500) operates by blocking access to those areas of the Internet you don't want your child to visit, usually newsgroups and some Web pages but also FTP and Gopher sites. The program comes with a built-in list of taboo sites and uses a filter (based on words in the URL) to avoid others as they are created. The monthly updates contain 40 to 80 naughty new sites. The drawback of SurfWatch is that you can't edit the list of banned sites or the filter yourself. And of course, all the kids worth their salt are going to figure out a way around SurfWatch and into alt.body.piercing.
