One evening, as Nancy Sanchez was waiting for the lights to go down in a movie theater, a woman tapped her on the shoulder and pointed to the teenage boy beside her. “He was one of the babies from your group,” the woman said. Thousands of moms on the Peninsula can make the same claim. Sanchez, the manager of community relations for Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital at Stanford, has led local support groups for new mothers for 17 years. Each week, 60 to 80 women and their infants attend one of four groups, trading tips and asking questions about feeding, sleeping, playing and bonding. “My favorite part is watching the relationship between a mother and baby evolve,” says Sanchez, herself a parent of three. She also enjoys seeing mothers throw aside the parenting books and start disregarding unsolicited advice: “I love to watch a mom say, ‘This is my own baby, and my choices are right.’”
