Can an app help reduce your mental load as a new parent?

It was the most mental arithmetic I'd done since school.

The numbers weren't complicated, but there were a lot of them. They were difficult to keep track of. When had our new baby boy last slept, and how long had he slept for? When did he last feed? What time did we last change his nappy?

As I found out in the summer of 2021 as we welcomed our son into the world, being a new parent is overwhelming in a lot of ways.

Along with the sleep deprivation, the emotional upheaval, and the pretty much impossible-to-comprehend overhaul to your day-to-day life, there's also the long list of information you need to keep track of in your head.

We were first recommended Huckleberry when our boy was around four months old. I was skeptical initially. An app to log our baby's daily habits sounded great on paper, but the colourful display — packed so full of different boxes and information it was hard to read without squinting — reminded me of an Excel spreadsheet. How would we find time to actually log everything? If I was struggling to remember how long it had been since our baby's last nap, how would I remember to record his sleep and wake times?

The doubts, I soon came to realise, were unfounded. Once we started using Huckleberry, and got into a rhythm with it, we found it incredibly useful — whether it was helping my wife quickly remember in the middle of the night which side he'd last fed from, or helping me figure out, when my wife was sleeping, what time he'd likely need his next nappy change. And it wasn't long before I realised there are many other parents who've gone down a similar route.

So how common is it to use an app like this? How do they actually help? And do they work for everyone? I spoke to parents, Huckleberry, and the Post-Natal Depression Awareness and Support foundation (PANDAS) to find out more.

Some examples of different Huckleberry displays. Credit: Huckleberry

32-year-old Beth Hawkins from Hampshire, UK, became a first-time mum during the pandemic. Prior to using an app, she told Mashable she felt lost.

"Before having a baby, I was very go with the flow, yet being a new mum and stuck in the house 23/7 during a pandemic (our hour out for exercise at the time!), I felt trapped and wanted to get into some form of routine to help us all get through the day a little bit easier, and with less tired tears," she explained."I'd read so much about how important a baby's routine was and the Huckleberry app was a great start to showing me, at 11am today, I should be free to grab a hot coffee, and mentally it helped me frame our day."

Hawkins used the app to track when she put her son down to sleep, how long his sleep was, and when he woke up again.

"I'd recommend these apps to anyone as a great way to capture all this information to give them aview on what their little one is doing, from feeding and sleeping, and to know they are doing a great job at being a mum," Hawkins said.

"Yet with all this information, I'd encourage those who feel like they are just logging these times and don't have a clue what to do with them or how to improve sleep and feeding if they need it, to not feel alone and to seek help."

Hawkins ended up contacting a sleep consultant, and using the data recorded in the app she managed to create a better sleep routine for her son. The experience ultimately led to her leaving her marketing career, training to be a child sleep consultant, and founding her own company, Starry Nights Baby Sleep, to help other mums.

Along with sleep, feeding was the other big topic that kept coming up when I spoke to parents.

40-year-old writer and graphic designer Ian MacAllen from Brooklyn, New York, used the $4.99-a-month app Baby Connect to keep track of his first child's feeds and medicine doses.

"At the two week checkup, the paediatrician was concerned the baby wasn't gaining enough weight," he explained. "The baby was exclusively eating breast milk, but preferred the milk pumped into a bottle. We started using the app to track the volume of milk the baby was drinking, and ensure the feedings were as often as the paediatrician wanted."

When the paediatrician advised them to supplement the breast milk with formula at six weeks, MacAllen and his wife used the app to track not only the amounts and the times of feeding, but also whether the feeds where breast milk or formula.

"We tried tracking the feedings with a pen and notepad for a few days, but the notepad was never in the same place as the feeding. It was easy to forget to log a bottle. We're a lot more likely to have our phones in our pockets than the notepad, and since the data synchronized across everyone's phones, anyone could enter a feeding."

Reflux medicine, which they were prescribed to help prevent their baby spitting up after feeds, was also logged in the app.

"When you aren't sleeping and are desperately trying to soothe a crying baby, it's surprisingly easy to forget whether or not you have given the baby the medicine," MacAllen said.

Elena Veleva, an IT consultant living in Sofia, Bulgaria, had a similar experience with an app called BabyTracker.

"When my first daughter was born I had difficulties breastfeeding and was trying to keep track of pumped quantities and how much formula and milk she drank, whether she was gaining weight properly, how many diapers she went through. I kept logging it in the Notes app on my phonebut this took too much time and the data wasn’t easy to analyze," Veleva said.

"BabyTracker helped me easily keep track of my daughter’s feeding and helped gradually dispel my anxiety that she wasn’t getting enough nutrition. Eventually we dropped the formula and I exclusively breastfed her — which was my goal."

As you can probably see, the use of apps like these is fairly widespread among parents. A Huckleberry spokesperson told Mashable that their app has served over 1.4 million families worldwide, with the most popular feature varying depending on the child's age (parents use the app "like a second brain" in the newborn months, they said, while sleep becomes a bigger focus later on).

Using Huckleberry does, of course, mean inputting a lot of data. Exactly how this data was being handled, and where it was going, was at the forefront of my mind the more we used the service, particularly given the frequency of large scale hacks in recent years, not to mention leaks and data misuse among tech companies.

"We use industry best practices for protecting data in transmission and storage such as using up-to-date encryption standards. We use encryption at transport, at rest, and asymmetric encryption," the Huckleberry spokesperson said. "Authentication is controlled on a fine-grained basis for our users as well as our internal team. We do not provide personal data to any third party or service provider unless consent is provided by the user. We don’t evenrun ads in the app. Data is used to provide more personalized experiences andrecommendations to our users."

Questions of data aside, though, are apps that enable you to track every little detail of your baby's life always beneficial? Is there a risk of becoming obsessed with the numbers, or of trying to adapt your baby to a routine that they're not necessarily ready for yet?

Sally Bunkham, communications and development manager at PANDAS, a UK support organisation for parents affected by perinatal mental illness, emphasised that there isn't a one-size-fits-all approach.

"Well researched and thought out tracker apps can be beneficial to parents to help them gain valuable insightand timely reminders ofinformation about the behaviours and needs of their babies. It can provide a useful framework to work around, as long as the information is given with the understanding that it's simply that, and not an exhaustive list of everything their baby should and should not be doing," Bunkham said.

"All babies are different and develop at different times, and trackers have a tendency not to allow for this. Parents can easily fall into the trap of reading up on everything their baby 'should' be doing by age, and becoming worried if this is not the case.We would hope that a parent would follow their own instincts for guidance, based on getting to know their baby, and their own routine (if they have/choose one) to develop their own confidence building of the practicalities of parenting.

"Apps are not built to take into consideration any additional health or nutritional needs that may be better off advised by a healthcare professional. Sleep and food patterns are variable across every baby and it is important that this is parent- or carer- and baby-led to ensure their needs are being met sufficiently and are not solely relied upon via a digital app."

As for me, I'll continue to use Huckleberry, at least for the time being. Like with most decisions I've found relating to our new son, picking the right thing to do never feels easy. But the app at least makes the day-to-day routines easier, and anything that can lighten that load — as most new parents probably know all too well — can't be undervalued.