Opinion | Forget the baby apps, it's better being an old-fashioned mother

One great thing about having a baby now is the huge range of apps available to help the mother - or so I thought. When my first child was born, in 2007, the "iCraze" hadn't even been born.

I'm not a technology addict, but I thought that surely, if there's any time when an app might be useful, it's when you have a newborn. So I set about downloading app after app - everything from "Baby Monitor Camera" to "Baby WebMD".

Don't feel like singing a lullaby? Nowadays, there's an app that does it for you. Don't like lullabies? Get the "White Noise Baby" app instead. Babies like shushing, but if you don't feel like going "shhh", there's an app. Can't remember what to pack when you go out with the baby? There's an app for that too.

I was having a wonderful time swiping and tapping away when suddenly I got a reminder: "You have not fed your baby in two days!" It's alarming for any new mother to read such words. In my sleep-deprived and confused state, I turned to my baby in panic, only to see the biggest smile on her perfectly content face. This didn't look like a baby that has missed 16 feeds. In fact, she hadn't; I had just missed updating my app 16 times.

That's the thing I didn't realise - apps, like babies themselves, take a lot of work. To get anything useful out of them, you have to be constantly on them, activating, inputting, downloading and selecting.

Within weeks, little red reminders started popping up all over my phone. When I tapped on them, very personal questions stared back at me, like: "What is the colour of her poop today?" or "When is the last time you drained your right breast?" I felt like shouting back: "None of your business!"