Mother's Ilk

Four years ago, after untold hours spent grinding out research at MIT and Harvard, Christine Koh made a huge breakthrough. But it wasn't in a lab; it wasn't even in her field.

The Boston native had been firmly on a professorship track, finishing up her postdoctoral fellowship in music and brain science, when she suddenly realized academia simply wasn't for her. Instead, she wanted to write. And what she wanted to write about was raising her new daughter, Laurel.

That same year, Koh founded the blog Boston Mamas as an outlet for her creativity. She filled it with everything she was learning as a new mom—offering product reviews and news of baby-related issues and events—and Boston Mamas quickly caught on with other Hub parents. Her brainchild became a bona fide business. Koh sold advertisements on her homepage, enlisted other mothers as contributors, and began drawing national attention. Last spring the research group Nielsen Online named Koh to its "Power Mom 50" list, ranking her among the most influential mommy bloggers in the country.

But although Koh arguably has attained queen-bee status, Boston's online parenting community is filled with myriad buzz-worthy sites. According to the Boston-based firm 360 Public Relations, New England is home to more than 200 mommy blogs, many of which have Hub ties. From JPMoms to Cambridge Mom's Blog to a blog run by the Boston Globe, these sites represent a concentration of maternal multitasking that few cities, if any, can match—and one that begs the question: Why, exactly, do Boston moms have so much to say?