The Data-Driven Parent
Is there such a thing as "too much" information?
by Kate Tuttle
September 28, 2009
"I love babies," says Ben MacNeill, "and I love technology, so it was a really good combo." He's talking about Trixie Tracker, a subscription website that grew out of his experiences as a stay-at-home dad weathering that combination of sleep deprivation and infant unpredictability that all parents remember as a kind of neonatal fog of war.
Starting when his daughter Trixie was born in 2003, MacNeill began recording every diaper and bottle and, later, each nap and hour of nighttime sleep. He started with a simple spreadsheet but soon put his background as a web developer and designer to use, building a web application to allow him to not only enter all the baby's vital statistics but also share them — with his wife, who had to return to work after a very brief maternity leave, and with the grandparents and other friends and relatives — via a widget on his blog. By 2006 the tool had grown into a site offering subscription and free accounts (about 8000 have been created so far) for parents looking to record, analyze and share the details of their children's daily care, everything from feeding to diapers to sleep to pumping and breastmilk inventory to prescription dosing. Trixie Tracker produces reports and charts and very cool visual representations of your baby's patterns, and those who spring for a paid account can use the iPhone interface.
Welcome to parenting in the wi-fi era.
Trixie Tracker isn't the only game in town; there's also the Baby Brain, Baby Bix, Baby Daily Log, and a host of other applications, available both online and for your phone. And with virtually endless internet connectivity, parents can log each pee and poo, each nursing or pumping session, whether they happen to be at home, at the coffeeshop, or while waiting in line to sign up Junior for the preschool they hope he gets into in three years.
Some parents, it seems, have always tracked data.
A century ago, a young mother was often counseled to slip a diaper pin around a bra strap to keep track of which breast she wanted to offer her baby at the next nursing session. Parents were often advised to keep careful records of their children's eating and eliminating schedules (and just as frequently warned that without a schedule their babies would run the household). Paper and pencil gave way to rudimentary spreadsheets as the personal computer entered the family home twenty-some years ago. Some parents, it seems, have always tracked data; as times changed, the popularity of data-tracking waxed and waned.
During my first child's early days, nearly sixteen years ago, any kind of tracking was pretty unusual — I didn't know anyone who did it — and ran counter to the conventional wisdom that had persisted since the '70s or so, to let babies find their own rhythms and routines, rather than forcing a schedule upon them. The only advice books pushing any kind of monitoring or scheduling came from the Christian parenting movement, and if Gary Ezzo's Babywise (a fundamentalist-based advice book whose insistence on "parent-directed feeding" led the American Academy of Pediatrics to publicly warn against it) told me I should pay attention to the length of time between nursing sessions, well, that was only further proof I should ignore such things.
So when I had a second child in 2006 — the same year the Trixie Tracker emerged from its Beta stage! — I was surprised to encounter a totally new type of fledgling parent: the unapologetic geek. This shouldn't have shocked me. The years between my two children have seen the birth of the iPhone, the spread of the Internet, and the rise of the Whole Foods empire. Now the perfect parent would be wired (and wireless), a geek who valued attachment parenting, organic foods, top-shelf computing devices and nifty design.
©2009 Kate Tuttle and Babble
About the Author
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Kate Tuttle is a writer and editor raising two children just outside Boston. |
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