Why do parents use apps to track their baby's sleep?

Chances are you're a millenial or Gen Z parent, who grew up with (who lives and breathes!) the digital age. It's easy for you to record when, and for how long, your baby sleeps with an app downloaded onto your smart phone. Actually, you'd be aware of apps which monitor most aspects of your baby's life, whether it's breastfeeds, milk intake if you're bottle feeding, urine and stool output, crying, or weight gain, plotted on percentile charts.

But to be frank, using a sleep app to monitor when and how often your baby sleeps won't help you

• End unmanageable sleep deprivation or sleep distress, or

• Protect your baby's sleep needs, so that your baby learns and grows as well as possible the way you might hear.

Having said that up front, experimenting is a great strength as you care for your little one, and you might be giving apps a go anyway, to see if they are useful to you. It's not wrong to track your baby's sleep with an app!

One of the great attractions of app use, it seems to me, is that the documentation helps make the occupational demands of caring for a baby visible. I come from an era where women's unpaid work was largely invisible, not only not valued by others or by our society, but unseen, unmeasured, and unacknowledged!

Gaining visiblity alone may be why a woman or primary carer chooses to use apps for a while. You're able to show yourself and any interested person (your partner? friends and relatives? ... everyone, from my point of view, who cares about you should be willing to be interested!) just how incredibly hard you are working, night and day. Using an app may give you a sense of satisfaction and even a sense of being in control as you at least document the chaos! Why not, if this works for you right now?

Some reasons why you mightn't use or might stop using a baby sleep app

On the other hand, here are some reasons why you might decide that app use doesn't help after a while, or even makes things harder. Or that using a baby sleep app had it's place, but now you're ready to stop.

• Recording in an app is something else you might feel you have to do, over and over, adding to your already high levels of occupational fatigue as you care for your baby.

• Recording your baby's sleep time and duration in an app doesn't deal with the underlying causes of excessive night waking.

• Recording in an app can have the same effect as looking at a clock in the night: it narrows your attention down onto sleep. This can actually make sleep worse.

• There is always the risk of an app developer sharing your personal details to other entities for commercial benefit - although I expect you're right across that one.

• Using an app might trick your mind into thinking that it's possible to regulate sleep and feeds into routines, if only you did things better. But biologically, infant feeds and sleep are highly irregular, if you're responding to your baby (which is the one big thing the research tells us is best for your baby's mental health and development long-term).

In The Possums Sleep Program I explore the kind of regulatory skills which really benefit parents. These are

• Knowing how to use your two superpowers (frequent flexible feeds and sensory nourishment) as you experiment with keeping your baby dialled down so that sleep becomes easy (or easier)

• Knowing how to manage the difficult thoughts and feelings which come up so often when we have a baby

• Knowing how to practice self-compassion.

As a GP who has worked with many families and their babies over the years, I can say that the detail recorded in the apps doesn't help me work with parents to get the best possible outcomes. For example, the history I take in a sleep consultation requires information about patterns over times across a range of indicators, not the daily detail, and it's best if parents give me an estimate from memory. Data from families' sleep apps doesn't improve the high quality of service that I aim to provide. I mention this, in case someone has said that having the app will help you in consultations with health providers.

Selected references

Ball H, Keegan A-A. Digital health tools to support parents with parent-infant sleep and mental well-being. npj Digital Medicine. 2022;5(185): https://doi.org/10.1038/s41746-41022-00732-41744.