Sweet dreams for bub?
Ciao Baby is a Kiwi-developed app to help parents with hard-to-settle babies who have tried to use the ‘controlled-crying’ or ‘Ferber’ method (where baby is reassured at regular intervals while he or she ‘cries it out’), but who get lost with the timing. As a Dad to a seventeen-month-old baby boy I am no stranger to this problem, and depending on your take on this rather emotive subject, this could be the solution.
Let the crying commence!
In a nutshell, the app is a timer to remind you when you need to go and reassure bub. The idea is that when you put baby down, if they start to cry you fire-up the app and hit ‘Start’. This triggers a countdown timer starting first at two minutes, then doubling to four, then doubling again to eight and… well, you get the picture.
Ciao Checklist
Before countdown commences for the first time, a checklist pops up and ensures that you’ve carried out all responsible checks such as making sure that baby’s nappy is clean, baby is not hungry etc. Only when you have checked ‘yes’ to each will the countdown start, which is a nice touch and shows that it has been coded by a responsible developer.
If you miss the alarm...
Once the countdown timer reaches zero, a cute little alarm is triggered which tells you it’s ‘time to see baby’. Due to the limitations of iPhone OS 3.x, if you quit out of the app or put your iPhone to sleep the alarm will not trigger, but it will carry on counting in the background which means you can quit out of it to check your email and then hop back into it without the counters being reset. Once iPhone OS 4 is released I would imagine it will be on the developer’s to-do list to code local push notifications into the app which will allow the app’s alarm to trigger even when the app is not currently on-screen.
The holy grail!
Once baby is asleep, you can hit the ‘Sleeping’ button which will wrap up the timing process and trigger a very appropriate ‘YAY!’ sound effect (though you may want to switch that off if baby’s room is nearby!). Another neat touch is that the app collects data as you use it which you can access at any point down the line, so if you’re really trying to understand baby’s sleep patterns the app will let you see exactly how long it took for he or she to go to sleep on any date where you ran the app. Genuinely interesting data such as the longest ‘wait’ period and number of settles are all provided letting you drill deep on some great data.
See baby's patterns
Baby’s name and sex can be entered to personalise the app and data, which is again a nice touch and you really get the idea that the developer is coming to this from a personal angle which is really neat.
Girl or Boy
There are a couple of things I would like to see from a future update which could enhance this app further. The first is being able to change the sounds of the ‘Sleeping’ button and the ‘time to see baby’ alert. As cute as they are it would be nice to be able to have a choice. The other thing that may be useful is if the ‘Checklist’ gave more info if you select ‘No’. At this stage it simply says you need to check everything before you continue. I would like to see it take you to a ‘tips’ page to give you more on info on what you need to check. I am not talking about full on medical advice just a bit of an extra tip or hint on what to look for.
If you’re using this method and need a hand with the timings, this is a great app. No judgement is being passed here on whether the Ferber Method is right or wrong so we don’t want to get to that in the comments. I haven’t gone in to whether using the app worked for me or not because the method itself is not what we’re looking at here, and the developer can’t be held responsible for whether it works or not – all we’re worried about is whether the app serves its purpose as an aid, and it sure does. At $2.59 it’s fairly priced and is available on the App Store via the link below now. It’s great to see the kiwi apps keep on coming!
– Ciao Baby by Little Blue Monkey
