Two weeks ago I came across a fun parenting blog called Game Theorist which covers “musings on economics and child rearing”. The author, economist Joshua Gans, is releasing a book next year called Parentonomics which is described as “Dr. Spock meets Freakonomics”. As a Freakonomics fan, I immediately wrote him to share my experiences with data collecting, charting and parenting.
Joshua blogged about Trixie Tracker a short time later in a post titled Data-driven Parenting. His title struck me as incredibly descriptive and useful in communicating our respective work. In the weeks since then, I’ve seen several other blogs use Joshua’s description in writing about Trixie Tracker. First the Freakonomics blog post Should You “Ferberize” Your Baby?, and then Kevin Kelly’s Trixie Tracker: Data-driven Parenting.
Three blog posts do not a meme make, but I think the term data-driven parenting may become more popular because it offers a convenient, easy-to-understand shorthand for a concept I’ve struggled to define. The best catch-all I’ve come up with is “baby tracking”, but that doesn’t paint a complete picture. So I’d like to say thanks to Joshua for coining the phrase and wish him luck with his Parentonomics release next year.
