Baby apps can empower and boost a parent’s confidence—but research shows the potential pitfalls, from entrenching gender stereotypes to impacting a mother’s mental health. A recent study looks at the role of baby-tracking apps
When she was trying to conceive, Clara* used the Flo app to track her ovulation. When she fell pregnant, she downloaded the What to Expect app to find out how big her baby was. Then, when she had her daughter, Clara used Baby Tracker to log all her nappy changes, plus Feed Tracker to record breastfeed times. And, after her mothers’ group friends started raving about it, she also downloaded Wonder Weeks to follow developmental changes.
Clara is one of many mums continuously using mobile apps on their parenting journey. It’s a common trend, and it’s basically a modern way of doing what parents have done forever: keeping track of their baby’s feeds, changes and sleep.
But while some new mums swear by these apps, others find they carry downsides, according to a recent study that explored the role of baby-tracking apps in parents’ lives.
The increased ‘appification’ of everyday life is often assumed to be a positive thing, increasing convenience, connection and control.
It’s true that for new parents or parents-to-be, the ability to quickly access health information or seek social support via their smartphone is invaluable.
For Clara, downloading that slew of baby-tracking apps onto her phone helped reduce the ‘mental load’ of remembering feed, nap and nappy-change times, too.
But while Clara and other participants in the study said using apps made them feel empowered and competent, not all parents have the same experience.
The study found that some parents linked the use of these apps to an increased sense of judgement and isolation.
This is partly because the use of phones and baby apps, particularly by mothers, is often assumed to distract them from bonding and responding to their babies’ cues.
This isn’t actually the case— in fact, research shows it may actually help alleviate stress and help them develop stronger relationships with their children—but it seems some mums find judgy comments or side-eye from loved ones makes them second-guess their app use.
This judgement of parents’ app use often comes from older family members, whose experience of parenting long predates the rise of the smartphone, the research found.
It can also come from partners who do not share the same responsibility and involvement in caregiving and who are therefore not aware of the usefulness of digital support tools.
See also: Health apps have potential to empower women—are they doing the opposite?
There’s another (potential) hidden downside to these baby apps: many of them focus on women’s bodies and experiences, and therefore assume all their users are female.
In other words, these apps are gendered in their design.
They’re also quite gendered in the way they’re used. Since women frequently use fertility and pregnancy trackers prior to a child’s birth, new mothers are often accustomed to using apps to support their parenting journey in a way fathers or non-birthing parents may not be.
These often-gendered patterns of app use can promote ongoing differences in the amount of time parents spend learning about early parenting, which can have lasting impacts on how they divide parenting responsibilities. In other words, they can further divide the load of parenting along stereotypically gendered lines.
But it’s not always bad news, the study found.
Depending on the features of the baby-tracking apps and how parents use them, these apps have potential to actually allow for more equitable involvement in parenting and better communication between parents.
One father interviewed in the study described how he’d sometimes access the shared baby-tracking data to gauge how his partner’s day had been going.
If the data suggested their infant had been unsettled, he would pick up a takeaway meal on the way home, ensuring his partner could rest and he could take the baby once he returned.
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