An Honest Friend With a Baby

The ideal pal for a new mom is another new mom with a baby who's just a few months older than your own. She'll be happy to listen to you rehash your birth tales, and her appetite for discussing the minutiae of infant care will be as insatiable as yours as well. And because she's a bit further down the road, she can lend useful perspective and tested advice.

Kim Schmidt of Omaha is glad she wasted no time connecting with other mothers after the birth of her daughter, Heather. During her maternity leave, she lined up visits with friends who had kids and joined a Mothers of Preschoolers group. "I can talk to my baby, but I can't have a meaningful conversation with her," she says. "And I have so many questions  -- about nursing, the baby, or things happening to my body. I keep wondering, 'Is this normal? Is that?'"

But not just any maternity-ward grad will do. New mothers need straight talk about postpartum life. "The last thing you want is someone telling you how blissed out she is about changing diapers," says psychologist Harriet Lerner, Ph.D., author of The Mother Dance: How Children Change Your Life. "Trust your gut reactions about what's helpful and what's not." Ditch moms who are competitive or who avoid delving beneath the jolly surface of parenthood.

Another useful resource is a pediatrician you can trust and communicate with. Seek out a doctor who doesn't rush you through your baby's checkups, is supportive, respects your intuition, and believes in the golden rule of new motherhood: There's no such thing as a stupid question.

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