TL;DR: We love having parenting advice that’s tailored for our family’s approach and our children’s unique strengths or challenges. We hope others find it helpful too.
I remember sitting on our couch with our brand new little baby girl the day we got home from the hospital and saying, “Ok, what now?” My wife and I looked at each other and it dawned on us (probably like most new parents) that we had no idea what we were doing. We had learned how to diaper and swaddle our daughter from the nurses during the 36 hrs or so after she was born. Carrie also learned how to nurse the baby but before we knew it we were, unbelievably, putting our precious little girl into a car seat for the ride home.
What do we do now?
How many hours between feedings? Should we wake her up to feed if she’s sleeping? Is she crying because she’s hungry even though she just ate? Oh, wait, we’re supposed to burp her. I googled something like, “newborn baby advice” and got results about what to do and expect in the next 4 weeks. 4 weeks?! I needed to know what to do in the next 4 hours.
Life with a newborn can be chaotic at first just based on the sheer number of things you don’t know, but yet really need to know. The information ramp-up is like drinking from a firehose and adds to the stress and anxiety so many new parents experience. There’s probably nothing that anyone can come up with to calm those early nerves better than family (especially grandparents) to come help out. The wisdom of those that have lived through it before you AND love you and the new little baby is just incredibly magical. Not everyone has those family resources (or lives close to them) but we were lucky in that regard. Eventually though the grandparents go home and you’re back to figuring things out yourself.
Finding our way
We had a 1000 questions in the coming months and didn’t want to be constantly bothering family and friends with what were probably the most obvious questions. So, like most new parents, we naturally turned to the internet for information about what the heck we were supposed to be doing in certain situations. Parent apps/websites, subreddits, ChatGPT and good old Google got put into heavy rotation. What type of sunscreen should we use? (Oh, no sunscreen, mostly just shade. Ok) How much water should we give her? (Oh, no water, just milk. Ok) Sometimes the information we’d find would conflict with other advice we saw. A lot of times, the nuance depended on how you wanted to parent your child, what your value system was, what information sources you wanted to use/believe. At other times, the information was just super generic and meant to be applicable for some theoretical generic child of roughly the same age.
The googling was reactive to what always felt like an emergency due to the utter lack of experience we had. We were always on our back foot and playing catch-up, which certainly added to the stress. Of course the sheer joy and love of being new parents exceeded the anxiety but, man, it would’ve been nice to have more confidence and knowledge ahead of time.
With the second child, we (hilariously) thought it would be easier since we now had some parenting experience. In some ways, yes that was true, but in others it was just us making incorrect assumptions. It was a very different pregnancy with our son, different early day challenges for him sleeping and, importantly, different dynamics at home now with a toddler being introduced to a newborn and all the perceptions of parental attention that can entail.
Unique Kiddos
Once our son was born last year, it became apparent pretty quickly how different our kids were. Same gene mixture, same loving extended family, same doctor/house/dog/sleep sacks. But they had different needs, different emotional states and triggers, different ways they wanted us to be around them. Just different kiddos.
The advice we got for our daughter wouldn’t necessarily always work for our son. And the pinball machine-like emotions of a toddler exploring her relationships with new little friends and then interacting with her brother and parents felt like someone was throwing a firecracker into a room full of monkeys sometimes.
We still (and increasingly) needed to look things up related to our toddler daughter but we also needed to search for advice for our son. It was now two firehoses of conflicting advice. We figured there had to be a better way to get the right information for us and our kids. My wife challenged me (a nerd) to see if I could build something to help us out.
Personalized Parenting
Nothing is more personal than being a parent. Your decisions directly impact/benefit the most important and vulnerable little creatures in your world. No matter what we read online or what someone tells us, at the end of the day we are the ones that decide how to support and shape our children’s experience. But we wanted an information tool that could help give us guidance that is unique to each of our kids and also to our family as a whole without needing to spend 8 hours a day terminally online.
So we built Totvia to take into account both a family’s parenting approach and unique factors about your child. My wife and I are constantly surprised at how useful and spot-on the advice is when we need it. Over the last 6 months or so, we’d use it multiple times a day, for example, to learn more about the behavior dynamics of potty training a toddler that is also seeking attention over a newborn. (That was super fun.) We used it to learn about solutions to newborn vs toddler constipation. To learn about sleep patterns and what might be impacting them through various milestones and regressions. To learn how to talk to our toddler about the death of a family pet without making her afraid of sickness or doctors. As our daughter grows, we’ve learned about clothing choice and a sense of autonomy.
Sharing Totvia with others
We’ve made Totvia free for everyone to try as well. If other parents find it useful, we’ll keep building it. We have an idea backlog of features that’s growing every day and we’d love to hear from you about what you’d like to see in this app. Feel free to create an account, put as much or as little personal information in as you’d like and see what shakes out. The app will automatically suggest guidance topics that are age appropriate for your child and you can input your own topic ideas and questions.
Be sure to Favorite and Follow topics that you want automated updates about. Also, you can share your guides and details (like the clothing choice link above) using the Share link with friends and family that don’t have Totvia accounts yet.
Please submit feedback in the app or send an email to support@totvia.com. Looking forward to hearing from you!