Is Tracking Everything About Your Baby a Good Thing?

It’s one thing to track things about ourselves, but it still feels like a bit of a strange new world to apply the same tracking to your newborn.

James Temperton, writing for Wired, contemplates the life with a new baby and how he and his partner have inadvertently fallen into the looking glass world of baby monitoring:

When it comes to infants, if you can think of it there’s probably an app or product that lets you monitor and track it. From poops to leaps and breastfeeding to sleeps, it can all be logged, tracked and analysed. After all, has a baby really pooped at all if it can’t be viewed as part of a Poop Frequency Trend Chart going back three months? It’s easy to be dismissive, but something more concerning is going on here: the collection of incredibly intimate data about us and our children on an unprecedented scale.

In addition to the privacy concerns, Temperton found one of the biggest issues was the most practical: all of the information didn’t translate to a better or more efficient experience because it was dizzyingly overwhelming. For more on his adventure in baby tracking, check out his appropriately named article “I Tracked Everything My Baby Did Until Nothing Made Sense Any More“.