5 Apps Every New Parent Needs To Have Installed
There is no doubt that being a new parent is a reason to be ecstatic. Not only is parenthood a picky gift that chooses whom it wants to be received by, but you are also given a chance to adore and cuddle a tiny human being who is your own bundle of delight! It is a sentiment you would not trade for anything.
But with that warm rush of cheer and joy of becoming a new parent comes the inevitable trouble of being one as well — a solid fact any new parent would rather not admit is that new parenthood is a jumble of miscellaneous forms of stress and panic. Suddenly, you are fully responsible for a new human life. Your baby basically crams itself into your days and nights, and for the next two or three months, you have no sleep routine, your mental health is in shambles, and your social life hangs by a thread. You are plagued with worry. You crave rest and find yourself willing to pay for help. Except for most new parents, human help can be in short supply.
Luckily, this is a time and age where technology has reached such a climax that any sort of help you would ever need is generally handheld and only one screen tap away. Right now, such help exists in apps built exclusively for new parents, and this article is all about presenting you with a hand-picked few of the best.
AI Baby Tracker by Glow
This is an app that may as well be your own digital logbook. Glow's AI Baby Tracker is precisely what its name suggests: it keeps track of all that relates to the health, habits, and needs of your baby.
Because a baby's schedule has no discernibly concrete order, it is sensible to log its sleep patterns, feeding times, and diaper usage, among other things, to achieve a particular order, and this AI-powered Baby Tracker has the ideal features for that. Not only does it follow your baby's physical progress over time, but it also comes with tools, such as a Breastfeeding Tracker and a Pump Log, for the parents to be well informed to keep their own activities scheduled and organized. It is also a one-stop platform of legitimate answers for questions you constantly find yourself asking as an inexperienced mom or dad, stockpiled with informative articles and tips on baby care.
AI Baby Tracker by Glow is free, but an upgrade to Glow Premium and subscribing to one of the few pricing plans offered will grant you access to more exciting features like the GlowGPT health assistant and premium articles in addition to the ones the free version already supplies. It's also worthwhile to know that this app is part of an app family of four and that the premium subscription of $59.99 a year works across all four apps.
BabySparks
Every parent's intent, including those new to the role, is that their child grows up to be smart and cognizant before they enter adulthood. The achievement of this depends entirely on the development of the baby's brain, principally within the course of the first three years, which is said to be the most critical learning stage in an individual's life as the brain hurries to evolve fast during this period.
BabySparks is an app that bears this fact heavily in mind. Coming from a team of educated advisors and developers who are parents themselves, this app is frequented with features that focus on engaging all areas of your child's brain in varying activities while opening you a window to spend some time with your child. It offers the ability to browse and watch short video clips where simple exercises that can easily be imitated at home or elsewhere are clearly demonstrated, aside from helpful tools that record and keep up with your baby's developmental journey throughout the process. "Milestones" on BabySparks is another interesting feature that evaluates what you achieve while using the app and is fully bolstered by proven psychological and scientific facts.
A free subscription gives you access to a feed teeming with useful information, along with a couple of videos a day. Premium BabySparks users receive a variety of additional opportunities for reasonable pricing plans, including the choice of taking parenting classes conducted live.
The Wonder Weeks
The outcome of a book written based on research of over 30 years, The Wonder Weeks app is a pretty-faced, easy-to-use system that has won awards for its unique excellence. The quality that highlights this app from its competitors is that it is a diary that revolves around the discovery going by the term "leaps," which take place throughout a baby's mental development.
Handling a moody baby is no easy feat for a new parent. Still, The Wonder Weeks comes to the rescue with tons of informative articles and potential explanations for your baby's mood swings, following the structure of the "10 leaps" and delivering service through a variety of customizable tracking features. This app helps you virtually experience what your baby must be feeling and thus put an end to the fuss when it happens.
On top of the prominent features are other helpful add-ons, including a baby monitor, a music player, plus the eBook and audiobook versions of the Wonder Weeks nonfiction, all of which can be bought at a fairly low price of $1.99 a month.
Huckleberry Sleep Baby Tracker
Any doctor you meet would surely stress how vital of a role sleep plays in the physical and mental well-being of an individual. This same truth applies to babies, but if, as new parents, you just did a frustrated shake of the head, you have a good reason. A baby's sleep routine — if it can be called one — is a disorderly flow of unpredictability as fickle as the weather, and therefore, so is yours. You are clueless about when your baby might fall asleep or wake up or when it might need to feed. You are just left hoping it will not be at three in the morning when you get your own much-needed rest.
The makers behind the Huckleberry Sleep Baby Tracker app understand the struggle. This app is especially centered around tracking a baby's nap/sleep times (among other activities) so it can record the data you upload and notify you when your baby is closing in on a need for a nap, feed, or a diaper-change so you can set a decent timetable for your day. The free version presents a sleep timer, blog access, and multi-caregiver sync. The app also comes with "SweetSpot," a feature available for Huckleberry Plus and Premium users, which uses your uploaded data to predict your child's next nap or sleeping period.
A cheaper alternative to a sleep consultant, the Huckleberry Sleep Baby Tracker is the ideal option to help you get better sleep with your baby.
Spotify
Spotify may come off as an unlikely entity to be on this list, but it turns out Spotify is a gold mine for parents with a new baby. Music has been proven to have calming benefits for the body and mind, and Spotify is a cornucopia of musical playlists and podcasts generated to suit almost every need and occasion, including parenting.
For new parents, Spotify presents a collection of podcasts where other new parents discuss their own experiences and share baby care tips and advice, which can be particularly helpful for a new mom or dad. As for music, Spotify is an app with stacks of playlists composed of lullabies, slow songs that you can enjoy while you play them in the background to liven up your baby's playtime, calming music to help calm a fussy baby, and even melodies to play while you give your baby a massage.
Although Spotify features that are the most useful, including access to an infinite amount of music, have been made available in the free version, its Premium version will give you an ad-free experience along with other features like offline downloads, unlimited skips, and better audio quality.