India, May 10 -- Motherhood has always come with a lot of unwanted opinions. What has changed is the scale, the speed, and the relentlessness with which those opinions now arrive. The group chat and the social media feed have become the two dominant areas where modern mothers measure themselves, often without meaning to, and rarely to their benefit.

A WhatsApp mothers' group, in theory, is a support network, but in practice, it frequently works as an unmoderated stream of comparisons, whose child walked first, whose school admission came through, whose birthday party had a theme. Nobody announces these things with the intention of making another mother feel inadequate, but the inadequacy arrives anyway as shared by Dr. Chandni Tugnait, a...