Parenting and Data: Baby Tracking Apps, Are They Actually Good?
Having more parenting data was not the panacea I had imagined it would be.
When I became a parent (around the time the pandemic started and the first commercial gen AI was released), I was sure data was my friend. This was mostly because, prior to starting a family, being data-driven had mostly served me well: I was raised in communities where the scientific approach was valued and where the pursuit of knowledge was a respected (and expected) endeavor; and professionally, data had been my friend for years as I helped design social impact programmes for groups of people that required decision-making related to macro-level policies and systems. In these contexts, more, high-quality data had always helped; more knowledge was always good.
So when I became a mother, I used baby tracking apps religiously, to track how much my baby ate, slept, pooped. I read as much peer-reviewed medical literature as I could on prenatal development and cognitive development, to try and sidestep what I perceived as wishy-washy mommy blogs trying to sell me things I didn’t need. My partner had his slew of baby apps, too - ones that pinged on certain days to tell us when a sleep regression was imminent, or when the baby was (likely) in a growth spurt. As he read out the paragraph description, followed by the bullet points of what to expect (and accompanying coping mechanisms), I would mentally steel myself for the upcoming nights of lost sleep, or endless crying and neediness, assured that because I had this data early on, I would be able to handle life better, more easily, with more grace. I had confidence that my parenting data would fortify me against risks, mistakes, stress.
None of this turned out to be true.
Instead, my apps made me a micromanager of my relationship with my child. If my baby missed a nap, my whole mood would sour, and feelings of panic would begin. I would look from the app’s notification “Nap 2 hours overdue” back to my child’s extremely wide, very awake eyes and feel: despair. Back then, if my child did not conform to the data, it was cause for “a bad day.” The baby tracking apps came to govern significant parts of my emotional reality, as did the WhatsApp group of local mums where we lived at the time. I would try to read every article or link they sent through, look at every recommended professional service or WedMD every medical term they shared. But trying to keep up with the 300 or so women further drained my emotional energy, and only worsened my mental health.
Are We the Ones Using Our Technology - Or the Other Way Around?
As of 2024, there were around 4,300 apps (and app-linked websites) related to baby tracking available globally and the market for medical health tracking apps (sometimes referred to as the mHealth market), under which baby tracking apps is one sub-category, was valued at more than US$31 billion (1). Despite this growing segment of users who desire more data on their children, however, interviews of mothers who use breastfeeding apps and growth trackers for their babies have found that “[these] apps are still relatively new and little is known about how they serve their purpose [of improving children’s developmental outcomes or maternal health]”. While research shows that these apps theoretically aim to achieve positive “interventions and behaviour change” by improving “data monitoring and information provision,” it remains unclear whether this is the case for the average parent user. (2)
Apps (including parenting apps) and technology devices in general were created, ideally, by humans to perform specific functions that improve our quality of life. We are supposed to use tech, not the other way around. Yet, when we allow our parenting apps to interfere (emotionally and implicitly or physically and explicitly) with our most intimate relationships (with our loved ones), we are letting our tech use us.
This is similar to the common controversy in digital parenting around recording moments of our children’s lives instead of allowing the moments to happen. When we immediately whip out our phones and iPads to take a photo or video of our child doing something, are we allowing our parenting tech to get in the way of the parenting itself? When we allow our families to build the habit of sitting in the living room or at a restaurant together, all looking at our tablets and phones, are we allowing our tech devices to use us? (My younger child sometimes says to me reflexively “Take a photo!” and now my joking response is “I will later…you haven’t even lived that moment in life yet! Let’s do it together.”)
Does More Data Lead to Better Living?
When we continually record photos and videos of our children - or mark down their feeding, pooping and sleeping data in a baby app - we are implicitly raising a question about what composes the fabric of our life experience. Is my life defined (in part) by my record of these data about myself and my child? Is my relationship with my child based on the documentation and data I have in my cloud archives? What does recording my child’s data add to my everyday experience - does it help me become a better parent?
From the perspective of the field of information science, data, information and knowledge are the three key concepts required to make sense of our information age - yet there are no easy answers as to where to draw the line between each item. Data, the plural of the Latin word datum, is a noun referring to things that are true or given; and traditionally, the most official account of the relationship between data, information and knowledge is the neat sequential flow of data leading to information, which leads to knowledge. In this official account, “data are the raw material for information and information is the raw material for knowledge” (3). But many thinkers dispute this simplistic sequence, choosing to emphasise that to have knowledge (not just data), you must be able to contextualise and make sense of the information you’re given; you must assimilate the information or data and allow it to change your behavior and lived experience for the better, to enhance your quality of life (or another end objective). (4)
In the case of parenting apps, we are asked by the apps and platforms to constantly gather and feed the app data; but only in some cases do we move to the important stage of synthesising this data into a better quality of life, or better relationships. Without the appropriate education or reflective practice in place to understand how to move from data to information to knowledge, we may become stuck at the “data stage” of parenting apps: constantly mining our lives for data to feed to a company or app that has convinced us that this is the basis of good parenting. If we constantly mine our parenting lives for these data without proper reflection on how this serves our children, and how it may affect our relationship with them, we run the risk of forever remaining on the outside of our own journey as a parent, watching from the outside as our children grow.
I spoke recently with another mum about the latest generation of parenting apps amongst our generation of parents: the parent-teacher app (or "school communication” app) where teachers record photos, videos and classroom observations of individual children and upload them for parents to review and comment on. These apps are a curious hybrid: part Reddit-like social platform (you can leave comments, participate in social forums with other parents, and like or love posts); part email (you receive personalised information and photo / video data of your child performing some activity everyday); part announcement board (“please remember to pack sunscreen next Thursday!”); and part Panopticon (where, it can sometimes seem, every minor action of a child is recorded in minutiae by the well-intentioned teacher).
The rise of the parent-teacher app is partly a phenomenon of our generation: as the first generation of digital natives to become parents to a new, younger generation of digital natives (2), we have brought a set of expectations to teachers that our predecessor Gen X-ers had not: we expect that all lived experiences of our children deserved to documented visually. But when does documenting these data begin to interfere with the experience of school itself, as a place to explore all facets of a child’s interest without the pressure to perform? Is school a place where we want our children to grow, or pose?
Too Much Data, Too Little Living
I deleted my baby tracking app and exited the mommy WhatsApp groups after the first 6 months, after making the explicit decision that both tech forums were contributing to my anxiety. I notified my partner of my decision and told him he could continue to use his app to track sleep regressions, but to please refrain from reading out the full data lists to me directly from the app, and to give the summarised versions in his own voice. For my next child, I consciously used no baby tracking apps and joined only 1 mommy WhatsApp group. I had learned my tolerance for data and tech devices, and I set boundaries to protect my motherhood experience this second time around, especially when I knew I would be in a particularly vulnerable mental and physiological state of the first 6-12 months.
For my own parent-teacher apps now, I am cognisant that there is too much that can be documented, and I stay vigilant on not checking it too much as well as - when I do check - being ready to raise a respectful conversation with our school administrators about the practice as a whole and what our values are as a learning community. While my school is, thankfully, intentionally lower-tech than most others of its kind, I do foresee a day in the near future where we will have to be more intentional about teaching new, incoming parents about the experience of the parent-teacher app and offer workshops to parents to teach them how to focus on knowledge and not just data. I believe this will help keep our school culture grounded and unique even as the world continues introducing increasingly invasive ways of documenting our children and relationships.
As more digital native parents begin to replace the older generations of parents, our schools and families will have increasing need to wrestle with questions of parenting tech and parenting data in a private, personal space of their relationships with their children. If you’d like to stay part of this conversation, consider joining our community on IG (@kigumigroup) and Open Collective or subscribe to our newsletter “Parenting in an AI-Age”.
References and Notes
Grand Market Research (https://www.grandviewresearch.com/industry-analysis/mhealth-app-market)
Dienelt, K.; Moores, C.; Miller, J. and Kaye Mehta. (2020) An investigation into the use of infant feeding tracker apps by breastfeeding mothers. Health Informatics Journal, 26(3):146045821988840
Zims, C. (2007) Conceptual Approaches for Defining Data, Information, and Knowledge. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 58(4):479–493. DOI: 10.1002/asi.2050
I identify the first generation of digital natives as those of us born in the late ‘80s to mid-’90s. The defining features of this generation of pioneer digital natives were individuals who got our first smart devices during the formative adolescent years (11-18) and whose adolescent years overlapped with the explosion of experimental social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.
