Friends who parent differently

I have a friend who I met after having Jude. I really enjoyed her honesty and refreshing openness after our children were born and she didn't wear the pretense of most of the new mums who seemed to always put on airs.

Over time, however, we drifted apart, having simply not enough in common to build a strong friendship. One of the biggest issues for me has long been that I don't agree with some of the choices she has made raising her daughter.

From the earliest age she talked strongly about not "allowing" her daughter to wake up frequently through the night. Although she never quite said it, I had the feeling she imposed a strict regime of controlled crying without hesitation. Raising a child strictly is her nature.

My issues continued to grow when, at the age of 1, her daughter was frequently stuck in time out for basically being a normal child. While I reserve time out for those rare times when Jude is really beyond coping and needs the time out to calm down, she used time out as a way to train her daughter to learn new skills. For example, she was put in time out for not speaking.

She recently had a 2nd baby, a boy. Her husband, so chuffed that his sperm was able to produce a male of the species, seemed hell bent on getting him out playing sports right away. When he was just 2 weeks old he took him swimming in the surf. A 2 week old baby sleeps and wakes to eat before going back to sleep. They don't, with all their minimal layers of fat, go swimming in the surf.

So how do you stay friends with someone when their parenting choices so utterly conflict with your own? It's really not easy.