Does Mumsnet sometimes make you feel you are at one extreme of the spectrum when perhaps you are somewhere in the middle?

[FrannyandZooey]

It does me. On here I feel like one of the lentilliest lentil weavers, and then when I meet a real one I feel like the eco-tourist I really am (i.e someone just playing at being green instead of really devoting their life to it).

I also feel on here that I am seen on here as being on the "completely obsessive" end of the scale about sun exposure, but talking to friends last night I realised I am actually in the relaxed area. Wow, some people are really bothered about sun cream. I mean really really bothered.

Is MN an accurate cross section of real life or are we just a bunch of oddballs?

For once we agree on something HMC!

Do we not agree on much usually Chandra? (hmc having a blonde moment and not being able to recollect having violently disagreed with Chandra, mostly on account of generally posting when over tired or pissed and being often rather preoccupied)

I was just thinking about this last time I was on. I, like Adorabelle, have only posted my own question once and have checked out lots of others and I have found that

a) sometimes I think I am coping ok compared to other MNers

b)sometimes I think the complete opposite

c) I almost always find someone else has posted about a concern I have which makes me realise we are all in the same boat at some time or another.

your all fkin nutters i am a sane voice in a wilderness of obsurd obsessive opinions which are mostly about nothing important.

and i am definatley not sane you lot much be loonies

I think I'm much more likely to speak my mind in RL (and do!) than I do on Mumsnet. Probably because I tend to be in awe of you lot, so I shut up when I think you're all lentil weaving lunatics, whereas apparently in real life I'm quite scary and tell people EXACTLY what I think..!

Hmmm - maybe I need to get more assertive on MN?!

Surely in RL it is a combination of a couple of things

Firstly - what hatwoman said about us trying to be cohesive about our views and modifying some of out views because in a face to face situation we don't always want confronation on a daily basis.

Second - on the whole I believe we gravitate towards people who are similar to ourselves - or I must at least. I think I am not that authoritarian as a parent compared to some of my friends and yet on MN I sometimes come away thinging I am a tyrant with no thought for my child's point of view.

I feel am a reasonably calm/non shouting type of mum in RL (compared to my friends anyway !!) but compared to those on MN I feel like a screaming hariddan who has no business rearing children because of the trauma I might cause them from shouting.

I find MN an incredibly painful place sometimes and dh is beginning to loathe it as I often come away feeling incredibly inadequate as a parent and can get depressed about it. However it also has had helped me clarify my opinions and the reasons for some of my choices - this over time has made me happier with them.

I have obviously missed this one because I had no idea there was a suncream controversy spectrum.

Fascinated. Is it things like suncream having chemicals in it that leech evilly into groundwater via being washed off child in bath? Or, yes, actually I did once read about how you ought to leave your child unsuncreamed for x minutes a day or they would get rickets. Is it that sort of thing?

More to the point, surely the issue is that in no RL conversation would you be getting 400+ points of view all at once (oh, maybe in Parliament). So of course a polarity develops that you'd never normally get. But that's the fun, isn't it - to realise just how gigantic the spectrum can be?

Bink, the sun cream thing I got involved in once was with me saying that no suntan is truly "safe" and with Enid saying that to let your children get a slight tan is fine, and with cod....well, being cod

I think we had a good discussion and ended it amicably. However it made me feel like I was on the barmy end of the anti-tan brigade. However the other night I was out with some friends who are much more concerned than I am about it, and realised I am quite normal after all.

Oh HC is here and says I am much much less of a hardcore lentil weaver than she expected

OK sorry to keep this one going (too lazy to search for the thread) but did it turn out that the pro-tan types were the ones that tan easily IRL and the anti-tan mums were the naturally pale / burnt types? Just wondered cos my surfer chick sis and I regularly battle this one out (although I have a watchmark for the first time in my life this year )

who cares what other people think-their problem

Yes possibly, buckets...my worried friends are all quite naturally pale...but we didn't really discuss that side of it, so I couldn't be sure.

I find it so much easier to be myself online - but at the same time I feel like I am lying, because I seem very very different to RL me. I remember when Psychomum first came online, she said something to do with it being nice seeing me being me, rather than the person who disappears when other human beings enter the room and becomes very very shy.

I am much more confident and say more of what I think online (which can be a very bad thing when hormones are involved... in rl I would just fume about irrelevant crp silently, but online I can often find an outlet, be a complete btch and end up upsetting people) - I just go with the flow in rl - if I am with a bottle lover, I just stay quiet (I do get very passionate about nappies both on and offline though ).

Feb mums seem to have some image of me bouncing about being creative all the time too... normally rocking in a corner in rl though

On mn, I get the feeling almost every family eats proper meals at a table with the right cutlery discussing their day and making conversation.

In RL, I know very few fathers who regularly get home in time for dinner with their children. Very few people who cook food from scratch. Or lay out a dining table with different courses.

'your all fkin nutters i am a sane voice in a wilderness of obsurd obsessive opinions which are mostly about nothing important.

and i am definatley not sane you lot much be loonies '

Spot on as usual, custy.

I'd say I was at one extreme end on mumsnet but not in the real world

Online parenting communities like this one have taught me to much more accepting of all parents and parenting styles, simply because of the clash of realities between the hard-line extremist views expressed in fora and the real world. It's much easier to be gung-ho about your pet subject on here when you don't have to talk to someone face to face.

There's a single mother on our street who never only has fruit in the house 'as a treat', who kids wouldn't know a green veg if it jumped and bit them, who lets them watch DVD's and play games that make my hair stand on end. The kind of mother who would be considered less than perfect on here...yet you couldn't wish for a more loving and committed mother, or for nicer, friendlier children. I also had to bite my tongue the other day when someone I work with announced she was pregnant and she had 'already told the midwife that she wasn't having any of that breast-feeding nonsense' Not my business..... so I took a deep breath, shut up and said nothing.