The extent to which "it matters" is subjective, I guess. I'm now the parent of a 2-year-old toddler and we didn't track any of that, we just were on the look for obvious signs of alarm but if everything looked normal we didn't count any of those variables. Everything went fine.

In fact, we almost had a problem due to "too much data tracking": in the first weeks, there was a point in which the baby hadn't gained weight for a week so the pediatrician suggested to give up exclusive breastfeeding and give him some formula to complement it. After some thought, we decided against it: we were quite aware of the benefits of exclusive breastfeeding, saw that the baby was otherwise looking and behaving fine, thought that the data on such short term maybe would not be significant, and gave him another week without changing anything. Next week, the baby was growing just fine, and he was exclusively breastfed until 6 months.

That said, if there's something I have learned as a parent is not to judge other parents, because no one knows what the right style of parenting is (and even when we know that option X is better than option Y, real life often makes it impossible to implement). So if data tracking apps work for some parents, more power to them, of course.

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.

> certain tools can help make a job easier

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.

This feels like really bad faith argumentation.

You haven't engaged with the point being made -- that the tools _might_ actually make the job easier.

You're just reiterating your view that "I didn't need these tools, so they are at best worthless and and at worst exploitative"

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".

Do you have children?

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.

There were also thousands of years when parents judged other parents for "that's not how I did it and you turned out just fine!". Thanks gramps :).

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.

There were also tens of thousands of years where you got TB and died aged 26, but I'll still take modern medicine when offered.

A fun fact is that most of the increase in life expectancy has come via a reduction in infant and child mortality

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.

> take a deep breath and not pressure yourself into giving away all your data

they were responding to a comment about a self-hosted web app, so it's not even relevant

> doesn't imply you're evil

Just that you're doing something "possibly harmful", you're "a sucker", and you're "just satisfying your urges". But, sure, not evil.

Yeah, they were shit comments, people aren't over reacting by asking how they could possibly be helpful.

Uh, you did see the self-hosted part, right?

> 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! (:

Disclaimer: I am the maintainer of Baby Buddy.

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.

As a parent, I enjoyed your post very much.

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.

It's funny: becoming a parent made me FAR less judgmental of other parents.

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.

"I make my life more difficult because people in the past had difficult lives"?

How far do you apply this model? Passenger airbags in your automobile too?

Imagine comparing WhatsApp to airbags.

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.

This feel vacuous -- people before 2000 had to live without WhatsApp because they existed in an WhatsApp-free environment.

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.

Maybe, but it still seems like micromanagement. The answer to "When does my baby poop?" will always be "Anytime it's inconvenient to clean up."

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.

That's only because measuring poop is the easiest way to measure food intake.

amen

I created a simple spreadsheet that we printed out / filled out each week. It worked great. No need for an app.

Same thing I'm doing right now. I intended to copy the data into CSV files to get a better sense of tracking, but (surprise surprise) I haven't kept up in what little free time the kid allows.

So far, the biggest benefits to tracking:

- Knowing how long we have until the next feeding. I swear he has a three hour timer in him somewhere.

- Knowing if one of us already gave him certain medications today.

- Calculating average amounts over the week before a pediatrician visit.

And, like all logging, it only shows its value in hindsight.

You can always throw away data you logged but later realize you don’t need, but you can’t go back in time and log data you now wish you had.

The benefit to the Baby Buddy approach is that whatever device with a web browser was closest to hand was where I could enter what just happened, or happened a few hours ago, because it was highly unlikely that I’d have entered a bunch of stuff I’d kept on paper into CSV.

Same. Sometimes, low tech is just fine. :)

> If you don’t know why it matters how many diapers there have been in the last 24 hours and what kind of mess was in there, along with how often and how much milk was consumed, you’ve obviously not been the primary caretaker of an infant recently.

I don't want to downplay your software and your effort but my wife and I raised two wonderful baby girls without any app tracking how many diapers we changed or how many poo they did. We only had to be a bit more "strict" on weight-gain tracking for the 1st one during her first 2 months or so because she was born quite small and we had some issues breastfeeding her at the beginning. I understand there might be situations where it is useful to track some data of the infant but I would say it's just if there is some underlying condition.

Hm. I should have said “why it might matter” because not everyone ends up with a baby surprisingly uninterested in nursing…

Hey pal, I have no idea why everyone is lining up to tell you that you’re wrong. I loved reading your story and it gave me a lot of warm, fuzzy feelings from when my child was little.

Our little people are all different and we all love our little people so we adapt to them the best we can. (My child is almost six, so at this point, ‘she adapts me’.) :)

You seem like a wonderful parent and I really dig your attention to detail. :)

Thanks for sharing Baby Buddy. My child was almost two when it was released. But holy crow, that would have been helpful!! :)

The times they are a-changin’

Baby Buddy helped me out in large part because even before I had a kid, I was kind of scatterbrained. After… oh god.

I kind of get why a lot of people react negatively. If you had the happy path, you think lactation consultants are ridiculous (what’s more natural than a baby sucking a boob?!), and of course the baby’s going to cry when he’s hungry, and he’ll be hungry when he needs to eat. And what are grandmothers and aunts and friends with older kids for, but to help the new mother learn her job and to point out to her when they think something’s not quite right with the baby that they’re constantly dropping by to cuddle?

Hi. Welcome to having a kid an ocean away from your close friends, a decade after your mother died, at a point in the pandemic when we were hearing promising news about vaccines being developed and quick, cheap tests on demand were a fantasy.

This kinda shows the problem with self-hosting though. Expectant parents just want an app they can directly use. Even something as simple as Heroku is outside the tech skills of 95% of parents.

Yeah, I wouldn’t bother suggesting it outside of some place like HN.

Baby Buddy maintainer here — I have often thought about trying to turn the app in to a product for non-techie parents and still respect user privacy but I feel like that is still a hard sell (i.e., I don’t think I’d get far just being more privacy focused than other options out there). Also the options have actually improved a pretty good deal since the time I started working on this for our family (from a usability, if not privacy POV).

Thanks, by the way, for contributing! We have long passed our own need for the app with our little ones but it has been a joy to maintain and interact with Baby Buddy’s users over the years.

Baby Buddy is a large part of why I was able to resist the well-meant pressure to just switch him to formula when breastfeeding wasn’t working out right away, and being compelled to log stuff from the beginning actually calmed me down a couple of times, so thank you for continuing to maintain a way to collect data that really helped us out in a way that respects my son’s long-term privacy :)

Maybe there is a market for paid apps and services that do not sell your data?

See my comment in another thread[0]. It doesn’t necessarily add much but my gut says probably not. Or if there is I would bet it’s just as or more niche than parents who would self-host their own app. But maybe I’m understanding the extent to which becoming a parent makes people think more about privacy as a priority?

Definitely curious to know if anyone has done any real research on this generally — that is, whether there is a real market for the “privacy focused” version of any product that would have other cheaper, less privacy focused options.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29993024

I also used baby buddy and it was great.

we used a piece of paper to log the diapers for the first kid. 2nd kid with more experience we just kept an eye on things and used our judgment. not sure why you need an app for this

I had a look at the screenshot and frankly, that sounds terrible. I mean, you are already stressed about all your new parental duties. Now you add the stress of the app. This is the opposite of what you need - that is, being relaxed.