WHEN Laura Hunter welcomes up to half a dozen fellow mothers to her suburban New Jersey home for an afternoon children’s play hour, she follows a strict routine. The children are ushered into the playroom or garden and given cups filled with apple or orange juice. Then Hunter gets out her real glasses and pours margaritas for the mums.

They have become known as the Mommies Who Drink, after the title of a new book by Brett Paesel, a California writer who urges mothers not to sacrifice their lives to child-rearing. Their cocktail of choice is the “momtini” — a potent Martini designed to make mothers feel better about the hours they are obliged to spend responsibly sober.

To the chagrin of America’s guardians of rigid parental correctness — which frowns on the intake of alcohol anywhere near anyone under 21 — increasing numbers of bored, frustrated or just plain thirsty mothers are flaunting their cocktail playgroups as a symbol of their liberation from domestic drudgery.

“I adore my children and feel fortunate to have been able to stay home with them, but I also love Martinis, shoes, novels and a well-used swear word,” said Susan Wagner, who describes herself on her Friday Playdate blog as “a martini-swilling, shoe-shopping, writer mom-of-two”.

Melissa Summers, a Michigan mother who invented the term momtini, attracted so many readers to her Suburban Bliss blog with accounts of serving bloody marys at children’s playgroups that she now sells T-shirts, coffee mugs and underwear emblazoned with the logo.

“These aren’t mothers who are getting wasted,” noted J D Griffioen, a contributor to Bloggingbaby.com. “The drink is a symbol that they haven’t completely let go of who they are, and haven’t let their kids overrun their lives entirely.”

The trend has stirred concern and criticism from psychologists and child development specialists who have warned that mothers are in danger of becoming alcoholics and their children are at risk from drunken driving on the way home. Conservative parents are appalled that their children might be exposed to other playgroup mothers swigging chilled chardonnay.

“Keep drinking during playdates,” sneered one blog contributor. “Then maybe you can all get together in the ER (emergency room) a few years from now when one of your kids wraps their car around a tree in a drunken stupor . . . like their moms taught them to do.”

Yet other mothers see the trend as a long-overdue backlash against “helicopter” parenting — over-protective parents who hover over every phase of their children’s lives.

“There is no guilt in craving social situations that aren’t wholly centred around everyone’s children,” said Christie Mellor, whose book The Three-Martini Playdate was intended as a tongue-in-cheek riposte to over-obsessive parents.

She said she was driven to rebel when she attended a “pyjama-rama” party at a California bookshop. It was a Friday evening and the parents as well as the children were dressed in pyjamas for story reading.

“I didn’t wait all this time to become a grown-up so that I could spend my weekend nights in my pyjamas singing along with a stuffed bunny,” Mellor said. She added that she was not advocating that mothers drink three Martinis — her book was “meant to be a metaphor for having more fun in your life and having a grown-up life”.

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