We raised three children without tracking data on their metabolic processes. We nursed them when they were hungry, changed them when they were moist or stinky, and comforted them when they were upset. The only thing we really measured is how little sleep we got. They have all grown into fine adults.
I have observed that one of the biggest causes of bad relationships between parents and their children -- and subsequent life problems for the children -- is when parents try to assert too much control. It's a fine line between responsibility and control, and the quality and quantity of information you need for the former before it becomes more of the latter.
The question is: do you need what the app gives you to fulfill your responsibilities, or do you just want it to satisfy your urges?
Bah! Back when I was a young parent, we had to track our baby's processes on stone tablets, that were on top of mountain, scratched with our bare fingers, and still our boy grew up into a fine knob thatcher.
> do you need what the app gives you to fulfill your responsibilities, or do you just want it to satisfy your urges?
There's a third option, which is that while not strictly necessary, certain tools can help make a job easier, so why not take advantage of them? I agree with you about having to be careful about control vs responsibility when raising a kid, but I'm not sure a baby poo tracker is crossing that line.
My first would go for days without pooping, some where around three mnths old? You could tell because she’d get testier and testier each day, till the day, then back to our happy little baby for a few more days. Woe if you didn’t have a well stocked diaper bag on the day.
Even if the data aren’t strictly needed, having them makes an interesting, important but difficult job a little easier to bear.
Sure. If you insist on doing the unnecessary, possibly harmful job there are plenty of consumer grifts you can join that are waiting to relieve you of your money or exploit you for profit in some other way, like tracking and reselling your personal information. There is, after all, a sucker born every minute. Some of them have recently become parents.
But that's not a third option. That's just satisfying your urges.
There is the little matter of tens of thousands of years of human evolution where illiterate parents wrote down none of that and were providing to many more babies than just the one. This is extra ironic because there was no point being made besides "you’ve obviously not been the primary caretaker of an infant recently".
If not, you have no idea what it’s like. If so, can you accept that you had a different experience than another parent??
We’re all different, our little people are different and parenting is lonely. Instead of jumping in with our hot takes on what will work best for another person’s child, why can’t we just say:
“That’s cool. Thanks for sharing. It reminds me of…”
We’re not talking about object oriented design patterns, there’s no need to be pedantic and nobody wins if one person is right. This is parenting.
If my late mother had been around for this, she would have thought I was nuts for going to so much trouble to breastfeed, and let me know on a regular basis :)
I treasure the detailed baby book she kept about me, though. My nerdy app data is helping me backfill one for my own son, who may or may not be interested in it once he has a kid.
Yet, you keep satisfying your urge to cast judgment on an internet stranger?? What’s the difference? How are you helping?? What utility does angry expert parent bregma provide to this thread or to the other parent’s life??
It really seems like they've been saying to take a deep breath and not pressure yourself into giving away all your data, and people here are self-defensively over-reacting. Saying that you don't _have_ to stress yourself out by being a micro-manager doesn't imply you're evil if you like being a micro-manager.
I catch that. But this parent isn’t giving away their data. They found a solution that works in their unique situation and chose to share it. I just don’t get the judgment.
Maybe I’m more sensitive to it because I’m a single parent and have faced my own judgment. But dude, other parents can be awful to parents. It’s not okay. Let’s just be kind - parenting is hard enough without every expert telling you that based on their experience with their 1.75 children, you’re wrong.
> There's a third option, which is that while not strictly necessary, certain tools can help make a job easier, so why not take advantage of them?
Agreed completely! We used (and are still using, for the infant) a homebrew spreadsheet with a pen and a clipboard. Worked incredibly well for all 3 of our children, who are all under 3 years of age. No apps here, no thanks.
edit/ And, best of all, we didn't have to sort out any bullshit software compatibility issues with our friends or family when they were in the house helping. There's no data export/exfiltration problems. When we wanted to share the feeding log, nap schedule, sleep schedule, diaper changing log, etc., for our twins with a couple we're friends with who had their own twins... I spent maybe 10 minutes scanning 18 months of spreadsheets and emailed it over.
I agree that "we used to do just fine" isn't a sufficient argument by itself. There are many things that we didn't have when we were kids and even if we turned out fine, they are clearly beneficial (say, meningitis vaccines).
But honestly, is there really much value in knowing e.g. exactly how much and how frequently our babies feed? I mean, if you've had a baby you will know that feeding is purely instinctive, they are wired for it, and if they're hungry they are very well equipped to let you know by crying at a volume that would put Motörhead at shame. Nature (through the baby) gives us plenty of messaging about how and when he needs food, it's just a matter of interpreting it. And all babies are different, so are you sure that some table or general guidelines will give you better information than the babies themselves will provide? And are you sure it's worth spending your scarce energy and thoughts, as a sleep-starved parent, on doing that kind of tracking?
Anyway, as I mentioned in a different post above, I don't judge anyone on these issues. Different things might work for different people. If these apps work for many parents and help them implement the kind of parenting they see fit, more power to them. For me they're a distraction from actually communicating and getting to know my son, but to each their own!
> But honestly, is there really much value in knowing e.g. exactly how much and how frequently our babies feed?
For some caregivers and babies, absolutely! Child birth and rearing, like many things, has a _lot_ of edge cases that most people who go through the process never experience or consider. There are cases where tracking closely on different aspects of baby’s habits or development may be crucial to more positive outcomes for the baby.
> And are you sure it's worth spending your scarce energy and thoughts, as a sleep-starved parent, on doing that kind of tracking?
Honestly this is one of the primary reasons Baby Buddy exists. If I as a caregiver have (or want!) to track some specific details about a baby I’d much rather do it on a device I have available to
me most of the time (my phone) and without having to worry about paper, pen, manual calculations, seeing those things at night, etc. This is absolutely personal opinion, but you asked! (:
We had a baby who had a hard time latching on and lost a bunch of weight after birth, enough that we had to ensure weight gain within a time period (a couple of weeks) to avoid medical escalation. That meant feeding on a schedule if it didn't happen naturally. We continuously monitored quantities and weights to hit that target.
We needed to know because, when we brought our twins home from the hospital, the smallest was under 5 lbs. It was incredibly important for/to us to understand, as accurately as we could how much was going in and how much was coming out from both of them because of how small they were. We probably could've stopped after 4-6 months but we kept it up, my wife liked knowing. We maintain a similar spreadsheet today for our infant but I suspect we'll stop around 6 months with this one.
What’s the value in making parents feel bad about their choices? Who cares about the utility?? Why can’t we just be kind to people in the thick of it?? God, have some fucking compassion…
Do you want me to judge every aspect of your parenting? Do my thoroughly unqualified opinions help in any way??
I have a serious question and I’d love a real response. Why are so many parents so judgmental??
It’s really interesting. OP shared a story about what works for their child. Rather than just leave it be, you judge it, conclude that it’s going to be a cause of a bad relationship between parent and child and then turn it around so it makes the parent seem selfish.
Has it ever occurred to you that none of really know what we’re doing? And that unless you happen to be a highly trained professional in one of about three areas, you’re not qualified to say things like that??
Finally, do you ever think about how lonely parenting can be because of judgmental people like you??
Look, we have enough doubt. What’s wrong with just being kind?? Did implying that OP will have a bad relationship with their child build you up??
If so, what are you teaching your children? And what’s up with the judging? Who cares what other parents do?? It’s frankly none of your business.
Your response here seems more confrontational than the comment you were responding to. Both of those were parents discussing their perspectives and their approaches to raising children.
I read disagreement in those words, but no real sense of acrimony, until your post attempted to cast one comment as somehow being unfairly judgemental of another.
What you're calling out is nothing more than a reasonable conversation and disagreement on the efficacy of using apps to help with parenting. One parent thinks they can be useful, and another thinks they are unnecessary and that many parents receive empty utility from it.
It's OK for people to have a conversation about that and disagree. As a parent myself, having conversations with other parents (and non-parents) about child-rearing approaches, and running into disagreements, and talking those over.. is all pretty normal.
It's a complex topic. I think people see their children as an opportunity to make things right, to produce a person without their flaws and traumas, who is able to live the good life, so they suddenly turn on this whole 'morality/ethics' bit of their brain that they haven't really used since they were like, seven.
As a result, they're really bad at it, really insecure of their conclusions, and really dogmatic. The cool thing is, it's not even along political lines. Everybody is judgemental.
Breathe a little. Concentrate on parenting your child, not on obsessing with what everyone else thinks. If dealing with all the tech and giving away your child's data does _not_ stress you out, then wonderful! Go find somewhere enthusiastic about that to post. However, every message that is critical of the current techno-take-my-child's-data-please culture isn't aimed at your ego as a targeted personal offense. People who critique a potentially negative cultural trend are not personally calling you a bad parent or evil person.
I’m not going to breathe but thank you for the suggestion. I’ve already run 20km this morning and I’m doing fine on my own without your help.
Continuing this is not useful. I wrote a high mer level comment and gave OP a bit of the support they deserve.
Just maybe reflect on how you treat people and think about how this thread might impact people in the thick of it. Sometimes, it’s more valuable to hear “good work” than another unqualified person’s hot take bases upon their own complete strangers.
“…giving away your child’s data”: What part of self-hosted are folks not grasping here, of all places? To be very specific, that data lives in a volume connected to a Docker container running Postgres, accessed by another Docker container running Baby Buddy, on a Hetzner VM, sitting behind WireGuard.
Please stop with the patronizing comments. There's plenty of substance in the GP comment without making sloppy assumptions about the poster's inner thoughts.
I gave up WhatsApp 2-3 years back thinking if people before 2000 could live without it I certainly can live without it. I am thinking of applying that principle to many things of my digital life.
He didn't compare WhatsApp to airbags. A meta-statement S[X] was instantiated by antropodie with X=WhatsApp, and separately instantiated by missedthecue with X=airbags. So far there has not been any logical judgment relating the two, beyond them both being instantiations of S.
S is the target, not S[X] for either instantiation.
I think the value in tracking lies when health problems arise. Your approach works fine for a variety of healthy babies. If poop suddenly changes color, consistency and frequency, there could be a problem that needs intervention. We tracked all this manually for the first few months, then scaled it down. The most serious "issue" was a week long constipation. If there is a problem for the pediatrician, you can provide a log of all the inputs and outputs without guesswork.
I was doing something bold and unusual that neither my grandmother nor my mother did: breastfeeding.
To further complicate matters, my son wasn’t waking up on his own to feed often enough. When I just let him set the pace, he slowly lost weight when he should have been gaining. Additional complication: Covid causing us to be completely on our own those first few months.
Tracking feeding times and weights made the problem more visible, and diapers calmed me down (he wasn’t dehydrated!), and drove me to supplement with formula and to seek out a lactation consultant, who got me to start pumping. Tracking that output let me slowly switch him out of formula back to my milk. My grandmother gave up nursing after a week when her first child was never satisfied, and my mother never attempted it (80s in Texas).
Now that he’s a robust toddler who eats pretty much anything in reach, I no longer bother with food and diaper tracking, but still track temperatures when he’s got a cold because our daycare has strict rules about time since last temperature over 38 before being allowed to return.
So yes, I needed a way to see how often he was feeding and how long, along with matching that up to weight changes. Could I have done it on paper? Sure. Was it easier with the web app? Yes.
Anyone who actually knows me would laugh their ass off at the thought of me being a controlling, micromanaging parent: I’m far too absent-minded. They’re more worried about me forgetting to pick him up from daycare or that he’s in the car. These days, the only consumption monitoring I do is to make sure he doesn’t swallow something that is not food.
Data collection from the beginning helped ensure that I wasn’t inadvertently starving my kid when he was shockingly uninterested in nursing, and I wanted to remind people that there’s another way to accomplish that than the class of terrible, privacy-invading apps heavily marketed to women about aspects of our lives we would otherwise consider the details of to be private.
I’m sorry if you had overly-controlling parents. I happily didn’t, beyond normal Texas Baptist notions of morality, and see my main job right now as keeping him from getting severely injured before he’s old enough to understand heat, gravity and chocking hazards.
I'm a little surprised that there's so much negative reaction to this idea. In practice, kids cannot be totally controlled; they're independent individuals, and they're sneaky, and they're fast. It seems natural to me, at least, that the better strategy for a parent is to be available when your kids are truly over their heads, and to try to do the high-level work of steering them and winning them over to the right direction.
I think the negative reaction is that the OP was talking about a baby tracking app. To extrapolate some kind of larger lesson about someone's parenting from their use of an app that tracks how often their baby poops is... a stretch, to say the least.
I mean, it's literally something our pediatrician told us to keep track of in the first few weeks of our kid's life. And keeping track of last nap, feed etc is a useful indicator for when the next one is going to be. Micromanagement maybe, but it does make life easier.
I have observed that one of the biggest causes of bad relationships between parents and their children -- and subsequent life problems for the children -- is when parents try to assert too much control. It's a fine line between responsibility and control, and the quality and quantity of information you need for the former before it becomes more of the latter.
The question is: do you need what the app gives you to fulfill your responsibilities, or do you just want it to satisfy your urges?