Having a baby is such a wonderful thing. And while parents have to endure sleepless nights, countless diaper changes, and a lot of other adjustments, nothing beats witnessing your child grow—from their first word to their first few steps.
To help you keep track and take note of your child’s development, we’ve curated a list of apps that will guide you through their progress, warn you of probable sleepless nights, tell you the next milestones to expect, suggest age-appropriate activities, and advise you on what else you can do to support their development.
1. BabySparks
BabySparks supports your child’s early development by creating a personalized program revolving around meaningful play. The app provides a daily customized program, containing eight to 10 activities that come in the form of instructional videos to help you do them with your child.
The app also enables you to track your child’s progress using a comprehensive tracker, based on highlights and milestones from early development authorities such as the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
The app automatically measures your child’s progress and generates a simple and easily understandable graphic of your child’s development.
You can also browse activities based on categories (e.g. gross motor development), places (e.g. home or outdoors), and milestones (e.g. walking).
BabySparks offers monthly, annual, and lifetime subscriptions.
Download: BabySparks for iOS | Android (Free, subscription available)
2. The Wonder Weeks
This multi-award-winning app is based on a Dutch book that draws from years of study and observation of infant development. It discusses 10 changes in mental development, called mental leaps, that take place during the first 20 months of a baby's life.
The app will help you to: know when to expect these difficult phases to start and end, gain insights about each leap, and take note of signals that a leap is on the way.
It also helps you to: keep track of your child’s development and milestones in a diary, tick off skills that your child has developed, and give you tips on how to help your child cope with and get the most out of these developmental phases.
The app includes extras such as a Wi-Fi baby monitor, a range of white noise sounds, an audiobook and eBook, and 350+ extra milestones to keep track of in the app’s diary.
Download: The Wonder Weeks for iOS | Android ($3.99)
3. Kinedu
Kinedu helps parents support their baby’s development by providing them with age-appropriate activities to cover everything from pregnancy through to the child's fourth birthday.
The app generates a personalized plan for your child based on the information you provide, including your child’s birthday and their age of gestation at delivery. It also provides detailed how-to video activities.
Kinedu provides you with more than 1,600 activities and access to a rich resource that contains more than 450 articles, telling you everything you need to know about your child’s growth.
Another perk is that you can add an unlimited number of people to access your baby’s plan and track their progress. You can add all your family members and caregivers. As they say, it takes a village to raise a child.
Kinedu is free to download. However, some features like detailed progress reports and specialist-written articles are only available for those with a premium subscription.
Download: Kinedu for iOS | Android (Free, subscription available)
4. Playfully
Fueled by the philosophy that children learn best through play, Playfully enables parents to play with their children by providing several activity ideas that they could do in the comforts of their homes.
It determines the best activities using algorithms based on your child’s age, your rating of activities, and the milestones you ticked off.
The activities also indicate which milestones (e.g. physical, language, social and emotional, or cognitive) are being targeted and give tips on how to best target them. They also show how long you can expect them to take.
The app also gives parents a heads-up of the common materials they might need for the activities lined up for the month.
Each week, the app shows a “tip of the week” coming from child development experts, like pediatric speech-language therapists and pediatricians. The app also shows a list of milestones that you will probably see emerge in your child.
The app also comes with a catalog that shows all the app’s activities. The catalog tab allows you to filter the activities according to your child’s current stage of development and age range.
Playfully plans come in three-month, one-year, and lifetime subscriptions.
Download: Playfully for iOS | Android (Free, subscription available)
5. Sprout Baby
If you currently use separate apps to track things other than your baby’s development—like feeding schedules, diaper changes, and growth—you might want to consider switching to a single app that keeps track of all of them.
Sprout Baby allows you to keep track of all of your baby’s daily activities. It has the following trackers:
- Developmental milestones tracker
- Health tracker for logging
- Growth tracker and charts following WHO datasets
The app can also generate daily, weekly, and monthly summaries of your baby’s development. This can give you an insight into patterns, trends, and possible red flags.
Sprout Baby can also generate a PDF summary of all logged data, which could come in handy during doctor’s visits. You can also use the app to store precious memories and milestones to be exported into a beautiful eBook.
Sprout SAFEsync also allows all data to be synced across all devices in real time. And what’s more, the app enables you to track multiple children.
As an iOS-exclusive app, not only does it come with a corresponding Apple Watch app, but Sproud Baby even has Siri shortcuts that allow for hands-free tracking.
Sprout offers a free seven-day trial.
Download: Sprout Baby for iOS (Subscription required, free trial available)
Be Ready to Catch Your Baby’s Important Milestones
Infancy is difficult, but it is also short and action-packed. In the blink of an eye, your little bundle of joy, swaddled tightly, will be up and about, running across the room.
Knowing what’s happening in each stage of your child’s development empowers you to support and even enhance it. These apps won’t only give you an easier time tracking, they will also equip you to better support and take care of your child.