The underground Mom Chat helping Philly parents fight loneliness

The Chat, as everyone refers to it, started with just a handful of moms. It was for the terrifying, thrilling moments of new motherhood: for grappling with breastfeeding, venting about in-laws and partners and sex, tracking milestones. It was especially for 3 a.m., when even in a city of 1.5 million people, it could feel like no one else in the world was awake.

In the Chat, someone was always up.

“It’s a lot of, ‘Am I crazy?’ Oh, no. Thank you so much for the support,” said Beth Auguste, who started the Chat in 2018.

Home from her corporate job with a new baby, Auguste wanted to get out of the house and to see other people. She signed up for a new moms group at the now-shuttered Nesting House on Passyunk Avenue. After the meeting, she asked the other mothers the fateful question — “If I started a WhatsApp, would you join?”

They said yes; she named it the “Mama Chat,” and changed the settings so that everyone could invite others. Some invited friends and neighbors. One mom added her group chat from prenatal yoga.

“I’d be standing in a group of people and another mom with a baby would come up and be like, ‘Oh, I see all these moms and babies,’” Auguste said. “And someone would say, ‘Yeah, we’re in a chat. Do you want to join?’”

Since then, the group has exploded, with hundreds of mothers and nonbinary parents communicating nonstop in dozens of connected subchats in every corner of the city. There has been a separate group for parents with babies born in every season since 2018, some of which meet regularly in person, along with groups for working mothers, single parents, people who want to talk about potty training or launching new businesses or sleep.

The Philly Parenting Chat, as it’s now called, has become a kind of underground regional network — part friendship circle, part consciousness-raising group — with its own sacred rules and defenders. Often, new mothers start in the main chat, and then join or create subchats based on their interests or due dates. There’s no data mining or monetizing.

It can seem surface-level, with mothers asking about the validity of TikTok “mommy hacks” and sharing information on baby clothes swaps. But through its endless stream of messages, invitations, jokes, and advice, the Chat is also prophylactic, helping combat parental isolation and stress in a moment when both have drawn the worried attention of the nation’s top doctors.

In August, the surgeon general issued an advisory calling the rise in parental stress and isolation a significant public health challenge, citing recent data in which 41% of parents said that “most days they are so stressed they cannot function.” The advisory report recommended creating spaces where parents could share experiences and ideas and build “mutual care and connection.”

In the past few decades, an individualistic model of parenting — parents concerned about and investing in their individual children — has accelerated in the U.S., said Melissa Milkie, a sociology professor at the University of Toronto who has written extensively on family life and wellbeing. Instead of viewing child raising as a collective good with shared stakes, the U.S. is structured to produce isolated families, each trying to do its best. In that context, organic groups like the Chat make a real difference.

“It’s a way to fill in some of the gaps in the current way that parents are living,” Milkie said, “in a society that doesn’t have as many supports.”

In 2018, April Hess had just given birth and was considering leaving her marriage. She was also new to the WhatsApp group, which quickly became a vital part of her life.

“It was a nice fill-in for that lack of partnership in my marriage,” she said, “to share the joys of, ‘oh my God, my baby actually slept for more than 2 hours!’”

Twelve weeks after giving birth, Hess ended her marriage and moved back in with her parents in Langhorne. Her whole life had been in South Philadelphia, and now she was caring for a newborn, by herself, in a new place. She was comforted by what she jokingly called “my pocket friends.”

“To just not feel alone,” Hess, who is 35, said. “To just at least have somebody else awake.”

A few years later, a friend in the Chat told her about a beautiful, old house for sale nearby. She ended up buying it off-market for hundreds of thousands of dollars less than the asking price because of the connection. Then, partly inspired by a conversation with another mother in the Chat, Hess decided to become a gestational surrogate. She gave birth to her “suro-baby” in July 2023.

While she had a high sex drive during the second pregnancy, it vanished afterward. As usual, she turned to the Chat.

“I’m nauseated ... like, I don’t want his leg to touch my leg when I’m sitting next to him,” she recalled writing about her partner at the time. More than 30 women replied — same here, they said. They offered practical tips, commiserated, promised it would get better.

“It made me feel like I wasn’t broken,” Hess said.

Occasional blowups happen in the Chat — in recent years, disagreements over politics and sleep training have sparked tension. The space is meant to be nonjudgmental, Auguste said, and if people violate that rule, they get a stern talking to in a private message by one of the founding members, some of whom act as unofficial moderators.

But even for charged topics, like whether to continue breastfeeding or switch to formula, the Chat can feel like an expansive, protected space, “like the internet without the internet,” as Auguste put it.

Deonna Wolf, who now lives in Westchester, gave birth to her second child in June 2023. She had breastfed her first child, but with her son, she wasn’t producing enough milk, despite pumping at all hours — even plugging her machine into the cigarette lighter in her car while she drove. She was increasingly wracked with guilt and worry: What if her son got sick, or didn’t develop as much as her daughter, and it was all her fault?

“It was putting me down a really deep, dark hole,” she said.

So Wolf confided in the Chat. That’s when another mother, with a baby a few months younger than hers, said she was producing too much milk. Did Wolf want any?

The two talked about the mother’s diet and medications, and Wolf decided to use it. (There’s a growing informal exchange of breast milk online, though the American Academy of Pediatrics advises against it.)

Over the course of four months, Wolf picked up about 300 bags of breast milk from the other mother, she said. Each time, she and the mother would talk about their postpartum lives — another connection during an isolating time.

“I wish I turned to it sooner,” Wolf, now 37, said.

Where a religious organization or a neighborhood group might have once stepped in, the Chat also often fills the gap during family crises.

In a subchat called “Look for the Helpers” (a reference to a Mr. Rogers quote), mothers organize meals and care for one another during births, illness, and deaths.

Becka Granados was initially skeptical when a friend added her to the original chat in 2018 (“Ah, one more thing,” she remembers thinking). But slowly she warmed to it, even celebrating a first birthday party for all the babies who turned 1 in the same season as her child.

Then, after years of fertility treatments, Granados got pregnant again. It was rocky from the start, and at 32 weeks, she was diagnosed with severe preeclampsia. She was hurried to the hospital, 45 minutes from her house, in the middle of the night, and then told she couldn’t go home for weeks. Her husband cared for her eldest, Lucy.

From her hospital bed, Granados told the Chat that Lucy, who was 6, was really struggling.

Immediately, they swooped in. They bought Lucy The Invisible String, a children’s book about how people who love each other are always connected, no matter where they are. They sent a gift card to Tildie’s Toy Box, for Lucy and for the new baby. And they delivered Granados a hospital care package, packed with a fleece blanket, cozy socks, ChapStick, and adult coloring books.

Granados, now 40, still gets choked up remembering it.

“I just never thought that seven years ago, I would be sitting in the hospital surrounded by these tokens of love and support from these people,” she said.