When setting up a website for parents about "the ups and downs of parenting" practical experience is essential: Anne O'Connor and her husband John Feeley, founders of Rollercoaster.ie, are parents of John junior, who is almost six, and in senior infants in the national school at Kinvara, Co Galway.

Setting up the site was far from being a whim by anxious parents. John senior has the technical background and Anne is a child clinical psychologist used to running sleep clinics for children. When she moved west from Dublin to Galway four years ago she planned to do something on sleep.

"What happened was I kind of got familiar with the internet and realised that there was no Irish parenting website. I thought it was something I could do and it also fitted in with my plans for my life in that I wanted to take a little bit of time out to spend time with my son."

Rollercoaster allowed Anne to do that. Mostly she works in the website office in the mornings or when he's at school.

Her job for the afternoon, she says is "Mummy". Every afternoon is different - sometimes he has friends over or visits friends. "I tend to try and get times during the week when it is just myself and himself and we are just doing stuff. We tend to be quite active where we are out and about a good bit." Cartoons are not a main feature of these activities, Anne is happy to admit.

She doesn't practise as a clinical psychologist anymore. If she wanted to work as a clinician she could, but she prefers to concentrate on Rollercoaster. This has made a significant difference: "The big thing is that I find we have time now. We would have been working and John would have been in a crΦche when he was small and it was always rushing around."

She says she has been fortunate to set up her working life so that it fits in with her role as a mum to John:. "From his point of view I'm not working because I just work while he's at school. It works out very well. Time is the big thing that has made a difference to us."

Anne's professional background does not mean she is supermum. "One of the difficulties of being a child psychologist is that a lot of people assume you are going to get it right all the time." she says. There is a bit of a gap between theory and practice and, according to Anne, research does not suggest that children whose parents work in child mental health are better adjusted than other kids.

"Sometimes there's a little bit of pressure in that other people think that you'll always get it right. Having said that I do think that the knowledge I've gained over years working with parents and kids in various different settings has been very useful."

For example, because Anne knows all about sleep it really struck her when she brought John home as a newborn that she was so lucky to understand what was going on. She also finds it helpful that she can make sense of his behaviour because she knows the developmental stage he is at. When it comes to discipline she is aware of all the different kinds of approaches that can be taken.

John, she believes, is not aware of all this: "I don't know whether he will become aware of it or not. I suppose as he gets older he probably will. He knows that my work is to help other mums and dads and help kids if they are upset. At the moment that's the height of it from his point of view."

Anne, of course, learns from the site herself - from the various contributors and especially from the 20-odd discussion boards: "I always keep an eye on the conversations that are going on and the amount of practical hints and tips I've picked up from those, it's great." She says she is just like any other mum in the community and neither the website nor her profession make her any different; it is just her work. "I always try to say, 'Look, I'm a parent as well, you know, I have as much difficulty as you in some areas'."