When we were little girls, we were told we could do and be anything we wanted. Our ambition was not — or not only — to be wives and mothers, but to be doctors or firefighters, just like our brothers. We prepared ourselves for these professions, but when we entered the workplace we were confronted with the harsh reality that balancing the demands of career and home is not merely difficult, but sometimes impossible.

The vast majority of mothers find themselves forced to make professional sacrifices. Even if they work full time, their careers are often on trajectories very different from what they’d imagined. And if one is forced by circumstance to sacrifice an ambition that one has nurtured, if one is forced to see oneself in a completely different way, then by God it had all better be worth it.

This means that our children have not only to be happy, but to do well, to be successful, to reflect the value of our sacrifice. That also means that our decisions about our children take on fraught meaning.

Someone else’s choice becomes, at times, not just another way to do things, but an attack on us, on our choices. We can’t disagree, because disagreement means that our choices are not merely different, but wrong. And we have far too much at stake to allow that possibility. So we go on the attack, we paint one another as bad mothers, when what we are really afraid of is that we might be one ourselves.

At the turn of the 20th century, in a newly mobile country full of immigrants, American mothers weren’t so sure their mothers’ homespun counsel was suited to the modern era. They eagerly turned to experts whose child-rearing dogma came backed up with laboratory data. But the advice conflicted, and it shifted — all too quickly. And it didn’t exactly inspire maternal confidence.

Then came Dr. Spock (who paid tribute to Mead) with his postwar call to mothers to “Trust yourself, you know more than you think you do.” It was supposed to banish maternal insecurity, deemed very bad for children — which spelled, yes, yet more anxiety as mothers now worried about their worry. Unless, that is, they happened to be the rare Norine type, a harbinger of the expert amateur who came into her own amid feminist ferment.

The trouble is, the newly empowered variety of mother — trolling the Internet discovering, discarding and dispensing counsel — has proved awfully fervent, and fickle, too. And she’s arguably more influential than male experts ever were. After all, mothers are a peer group that can exert very intimate pressure, harder to dismiss than the dogma of a distant adviser who’s likely soon to be debunked.

Maternal judgments draw on daily experience, not just data, for support — and they’re now addressed to an audience for whom high-level parental performance is a priority with new urgency, as mothers struggle with the guilt that comes with juggling jobs, too. Child-rearing has become the venue, as the psychologist Jerome Kagan has remarked, for proving our virtue.

It’s almost enough to make a mother conclude there’s no way to win. These days, even the “slacker mom” in revolt against the “sanctimommy” — that oppressive arbiter of calm, developmentally correct parenthood — can sound pretty dogmatic herself: as they revel in domestic chaos in their outspoken blogs and books, “naughty mommies,” too, seem to know best.

Would it comfort or unnerve Priss Crockett, who would be nearing 100, to discover how much she can recognize in all this? I think any mother can answer that: both.

If you really want to know how judgmental moms are of each other, try publishing an article on child-rearing. Within half an hour, your inbox will be hemorrhaging. There will even be snarky e-mails from women whom you were stupid enough to think you agreed with.

Over-sensitive?

Hey, who are you calling over-sensitive?

There is no one more bristlingly defensive than a woman whose mothering has been called into question. Moms worry for a living. If we screw up our job, it’s not a delivery of fruit that goes bad. It’s the next generation.

So we hold ourselves to high standards and can be brutal in our condemnation of moms who fall asleep at the wheel. Rightly so. The fear that we ourselves may be falling below those high standards — that other women somehow have it all beautifully under control and are gaining a competitive advantage for their kids — makes us insecure. And we shore ourselves up against insecurity by, yep, judging other mothers and making THEM feel insecure.

The entry of women to the professional workplace in huge numbers has caused an escalation in mom-on-mom criticism. For those of us weighed down by laptops and guilt there is the tiny consolation that full-time moms may be overscheduling their Little Darlings or suffocating them with attention. (The thought that our own L.D.s might be grateful to be suffocated with attention is inadmissible; much easier to question the wisdom of the women who have no career.)

Meanwhile, the stay-home mom has the toughest job in the world, but no salary and little status. Who could possibly deny her the perk of rejoicing in the inadequacies of the permanently frazzled working mother?

In the end, it all comes down to Darwin. Mother Nature programmed moms to be guiltily competitive with each other so the bar would be raised for all and our kids would be smarter, safer and healthier.

A wise old bird, Mother Nature realized there was no point trying to make dads judge each other. Very little is to be expected from a gender that thinks it’s O.K. to take your beautiful child to a party dressed like Eminem.

Altogether now, ladies: “I mean, what sort of person allows their kid to go out dressed like that?”

Are our identities this unstable? Perhaps this isn’t surprising at a time when many of the old certainties are gone.

We’ve been liberated from the narrow life paths that mothers were expected to assume in generations past. But we don’t particularly embrace this liberation. Unlike the baby boomers before us, we don’t revel in the new possibilities of motherhood today, largely because the promises of feminism have time and again come up against a wall of political impossibility.

Our much-vaunted “choices,” in an absence of family-friendly social policies, have largely proven hollow. For most mothers, the real freedom to choose how they live their lives remains a distant dream. Many blame themselves for falling short and then buttress themselves against self-criticism by critiquing other mothers’ so-called choices.

There would be great relief — and much greater solidarity — for mothers in realizing that just about everyone, in one way or another, is struggling to keep her head above water.

Those parenting philosophies are based on belief systems handed down intact from mother to mother, which also means the opinions of a culture are in agreement. In contrast, mothers in Western culture turn to “experts”— pediatricians and advice books — and each one of those has its own view which makes for a Tower of Babel of parenting philosophies.

We are in this position because the traditions of motherhood are on the decline in the West. With our low birth rate, most young mothers have had no experience caring for younger siblings, and few have put in the hours as a teen babysitters.

Women often move far from their extended families and so parenting traditions are lost. Western mothers are also used to rejecting the older generation and reinventing themselves as better educated and more in the know about everything, including parenting.

As a result, motherhood has become a soap box. At least that’s my opinion, and I’m entitled to one since I’m a mother in Western culture.

Mothers judging and berating other mothers, assuming that somehow the One True Way of creating good sleep patterns or knowing when to wean will arise from the skirmish, hides the true reality of child rearing: that it’s the ultimate-on-the-job training, and that there are a lot of successful ways to do it. This means making mistakes, of course, which no new mother ever wants to do. But as anyone who’s raised a kid from newborn to high school graduate knows, the only way is to follow your instincts, and hope your child never writes a memoir.

This means we’ve got an arsenal of facts, figures and expert quotes at our disposal to support whatever point we’re trying to argue. How could we possibly be wrong when we’ve got so much information indicating we’re right!

The Web’s culture of instant commentary, where we can often hide behind the cloak of anonymity, is also one where we tend to shed (or forget about) the filters of decorum we use in face-to-face interactions. Our emotions and our mouths (well, keyboards) are permitted to run amok, creating the perfect environment for us to critique others.

And so UrbanBaby users can be just as passionate and hyper-articulate in discussing the H1N1 flu vaccine as they can about Lady Gaga, Go-Gurt and defining whether having a Facebook friendship with an old college boyfriend or girlfriend constitutes cheating on a spouse.

We all log hundreds of hours at ice skating competitions, soccer games, drama rehearsals, tennis matches and cello auditions. We worry over whether we have chosen the correct educational settings and extracurricular activities for our children. We awake before dawn and stay up past midnight ensuring that no stone has been left unturned in the pursuit of anything and everything that will benefit our children and enrich their lives.

We don’t have time to judge others. We’d rather offer support and encouragement.