> 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.
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.
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"
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
Do you want me to judge every aspect of your parenting? Do my thoroughly unqualified opinions help in any way??
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.
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.
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.
How far do you apply this model? Passenger airbags in your automobile too?
S is the target, not S[X] for either instantiation.
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.
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 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?