The Truth of the Mommy Wars

By NORA S. NEWCOMBE

My children are now 19 and 23 years old. When they were young, and I was an associate professor of developmental psychology, I used to spend a good deal of the scant time I had alone in my office worrying about child care, fretting about whether my children would grow up to feel unloved and abandoned. I had watched my own mother, with a Ph.D. in chemistry she never used, struggle with depression and isolation in a sea of suburban moms who shopped, and I suspected that I had made the right