There are a couple of apps out there! Although my experience was that I didn't really have a need for the data when all was said and done. Maybe I should have picked up knitting..

I'm not a parent, but my sister, and many of my friends, are of the life stage where they have kids under 5. The amount of tracking I see them do, especially in the first year of life, is insane. Is there a medical use for it? Do parents share the data with their pediatricians? If not, what's the point? Since all these apps are free, I assume it all just feeds some giant data science model that helps diaper companies advertise better, or something else utterly annoying like that.

(Then again, I usually use a sleep tracker, and aside from a quick glance in the morning, never ever look at the data again. But I figure baby tracking has a decent amount of overhead, and parents are already overworked and overtired enough as it is...)

Most tracking isn’t really necessary, though it’s a very uncertain time so it does make you feel like you’re doing something useful.

Tracking is genuinely useful though when you’ve noticed something and are trying to gather evidence of a pattern to bring to a healthcare professional - for example around sleeping or feeding.

During the first year, our child never slept more than about 20 mins in any one go.

We kept logs in a shared Apple note. Looking back at it now, it reads more like a tale of two people’s slow descent into madness than something that could be turned into a knitting pattern.