Decades of service stories on potty training and finger painting have been the mainstay of the parenting magazines, long a stable if sleepy category.

Suddenly all that's changing. New titles are launching, and there's an increasing shift of focus to the internet as the longtime players and new entrants jostle for position in what's turned into a fast-changing mom marketplace. To say the least, it's also a sizable one, with mothers of all ages accounting for a third of the U.S. population.

"Even the major parenting publications are putting out spin-offs. From the days before you are pregnant, to the first day your child is born, to one month, to three months to five years—for everything, there's a magazine out there," says Samir Husni, a University of Mississippi journalism professor who tracks magazines, specifically magazine launches.

The parenting category has traditionally been made up of a half-dozen titles, led by Parents and Parenting, but it seems new ones are launching one after the other, including Conde Nast's Cookie and Disney's Wondertime. Among the established players, Meredith has been in a growth mode, picking up the American Baby group from Primedia in 2002 and Gruner + Jahr titles Child and Parents last year.

Why the flush of new titles and general bustle?  One reason is that the art of parenting has changed, as have the range of goods and services available to parents, says Cookie publisher Eva Dillon. That's creating opportunities for publishers.
 
"In the last five or 10 years, there's been a big change in the way parents interact with their children. Parents used to send their children out to play all afternoon, and now everything parents do they want to do with their kids. It's a very different era for families," Dillon says. "We set out to be a lifestyle magazine for parents, rather than a parenting magazine per se."

Targeting affluent mothers in their 30s and 40s, Cookie is attracting a range of traditional Conde Nast advertisers, says Dillon, many of them altogether new to the parenting category, such as luxury brands like Cartier and Gucci. But she says Cookie is also bringing in new advertisers to the company.

Cookie's top ad category is fashion and retail, followed by beauty and health, travel, automotive, food and home goods. Dillon says fashion is driven by a trend among top designers toward baby and children's wear. Cookie's rate base will increase to 350,000 in 2007, from 300,000 at its launch last November, and Dillon says it could reach 800,000 within several years.

To distinguish itself as a lifestyle title, and apart from the existing parenting titles, Cookie recruited editorial talent from a wide range of magazines, from the likes of W magazine and Real Simple. The idea was to skip past the Parenting 101 features. "Our reader is going to get that information from the internet, from their doctors and their friends," Dillon says.

Similarly, Disney's Wondertime seeks to serve an underserved segment of the mom market.

"While this category has been incredibly successful over time, there has not been an awful lot of innovation," says Glenn Rosenbloom, senior vice president and group publisher of Disney's U.S. Consumer Magazine Group. Wondertime, he says, is a "magazine that is more about the joys of parenting as opposed to the job of parenting, a more thoughtful, comprehensive look at the issues mothers face." 

Wondertime launched in February as a quarterly with a rate base of 300,000. That will rise to 400,000 when it goes bimonthly next February. Disney also publishes Disney Adventures and Family Fun.

The new competition in the parenting category is taking a toll. The major parenting titles are seeing declines in ad pages, averaging an 8.8 percent drop in the first five months of the year.

That's not so surprising, says Husni. "When a specialty becomes a general topic, we see the bigger publications start to lose some of their ad pages. When you have all these new titles that appear on the marketplace, then someone is going to lose."

But there's also a notable shift to the internet, with publishers scrambling to build up their web presence to keep their hold on busy mothers, an especially internet savvy demographic. Meredith, with its three print titles claiming a combined circulation of 5 million and an audience of 25 million, is set to merge its web sites into one massive parenting portal next year, to better serve readers.

"This market is so time-pressed. They're information-hungry but they're very busy. They've got a new baby to take care of, so their time to themselves may be at three in the morning," says Norma Blatto, vice president and publisher of American Baby.

"There's a lot of change in the market right now, and it certainly has affected American Baby. But American Baby is just one prong of the many ways that we reach mothers," says Blatto.

American Baby claims to reach 95 percent of new moms through its primary print publication, its three Spanish-language titles, and a weekly welcome issue for expecting mothers, along with mobile content, video on demand and its web site.

The goal of the Meredith parenting portal, says Child magazine publisher Richard Berenson, is to bring to bear the publishing giant's massive audience of parents, creating one unified site that will bring together the 2 to 3 million monthly visitors Meredith’s parenting sites now see.

"We'll make one giant online resource for moms," says Berenson. The idea, he says, is that mothers will go online for quick information but will continue to turn to Child and the other Meredith titles for in-depth stories.

But Meredith will face lots of competition online, and much of it will not be from competing titles.

Debra Aho Williamson, a senior analyst for eMarketer, says that moms online are most likely to visit social networking sites, not magazines' sites. According to a recent eMarketer report, they're much more likely to spend time on community content sites, or even auction or gaming sites, than on sites specifically focused on family and kids.

"So much attention has shifted away from the content producers to information that is produced by moms. There's a lot less interest in published content. There's been a really dramatic shift in where people look for information," she says.

"There are a lot of moms online. They're getting very savvy. They're not the quote-unquote newbies anymore. They're not just going on line for basic needs, they're going there to learn and explore."