New mother who tracked EVERY baby feed and diaper change for seven weeks presents the data to her colleagues to prove just how much work maternity leave really is
- San Francisco-based Kristen Cuneo and her husband Michael DiBenigno welcomed a daughter named Autumn in January
- To manage their time and get her on a schedule, they tracked her eating and diaper-change habits in a baby app called Glow
- When Kristen's colleagues asked her what maternity leave was like, she and Michael decided to use the data from the app to show them
- They created a data visualization with pinpoints for each diaper change and feeding
- When the graph is turned, the length of the dot shows how long each one took - and Kristen stressed that these happened at all hours of the day
- She presented the data to her colleagues, and Michael shared a video on TikTok that has gone viral
A new mom has gone viral for using data visualization to show her coworkers how she spent her time on maternity leave, documenting the constant diaper changes and feedings during her daughter's first few weeks of life.
Kristen Cuneo, who works for a technology company in the San Francisco Bay area, said that her coworkers had asked what maternity leave was like — so she and her husband Michael DiBenigno, the co-founder of California-based company Flow Immersive, started graphing data points to show them.
After Kristen shared the presentation with her colleagues, Michael posted it on TikTok, where it's earned over 2.6 million views.
Family of three: Kristen Cuneo and her husband Michael DiBenigno welcomed a daughter named Autumn in January
Data is beautiful: To manage their time and get her on a schedule, they tracked her eating and diaper-change habits in a baby app called Glow
@the.data.guy Let’s be real @lifeof.kristenc ♬ original sound - Michael DiBenigno
After their daughter Autumn was born in January, Kristen and Michael began using a baby habit-tracking app called Glow to keep tabs of her feeding and diaper changing times — and in it, they documented every bottle feed, breastfeed, and diaper change over the course of her first seven weeks of life.
'We had heard over and over that being a new parent, you never sleep, but it's hard to understand what that really felt like,' Michael told Good Morning America.
'It wasn't until we saw the data points and put together this visualization that we were like, "Wow, you see that continual, never-ending cycle of the mundane, routine labor of all these things that are just necessary."'
Kristen concurs, and said so in a virtual presentation she gave to her colleagues.
'It actually wasn't until I saw a data visualization of Autumn's habits that I actually felt some relief,' she says in the video.
'This is every diaper change, breastfeed, and bottle feed for the first seven weeks of Autumn's life,' she explains, showing the data visualization, with each activity represented by a single dot.
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Check it out: When Kristen's colleagues asked her what maternity leave was like, she and Michael created a data visualization with pinpoints for each diaper change and feeding
Time-consuming! When the graph is turned, the length of the dot shows how long each one took - and Kristen stressed that these happened at all hours of the day
She presented the data to her colleagues, and Michael shared a video on TikTok that has gone viral
But the dots don't even tell the full story. She then turned the graph, showing each dot grow into a line representing the length of time the activity required.
'Objectively, it's a lot, and every data point took time, ranging from five minutes for a diaper change to 30 minutes for a feeding, on average,' she said.
'That's a lot when you add it up. And the real kicker is when it happens, 24 hours a day,' she said.
'The midnight bottle feed by my husband in the third week made it finally possible for me to get more than a three-hour stretch of sleep.'
Viewers on TikTok are impressed, and supportive comments have poured in.
'Oh my god this woman needs to be in front of Congress,' wrote one woman.
'People who don't support family leave think it's a vacation,' wrote one man, adding a clown emoji.
Kristen later shared the same data in another video with a 3D visualization
She said she is lucky to have had five months' maternity leave, which she described as 'very generous'
'People who think paternity leave is for the dad [clown emoji] — it's so the other parent has support,' wrote another man.
Others noted that the data visualization only includes three habits and chores and misses a lot of other things new parents do.
'And that does not include laundry, bathing, well baby checkups, getting baby to sleep, fussy baby, or the fact that baby needs to be held constantly,' said one woman.
Kristen — who later shared the same data in another video with a 3D visualization — said that she is lucky to have had five months' maternity leave, which she described as 'very generous.'
'It is a shared experience, even though it is hard,' she said. 'The response that we've gotten has been completely mind-boggling, that so many people can have this experience, and yet something like this could resonate so powerfully for them whether or not they're currently raising a child or maybe they did 20 years ago.'
'I think part of what the data helps with is helping people remember that it actually is work. Parenting is a great privilege, and I am so appreciative that we get to partake in it. And it's still work,' Kristen said.
'Part of the reason I used the data in the way I did was to help illustrate that the time we spend raising Autumn is very chaotic,' she said
'Part of the reason I used the data in the way I did was to help illustrate that the time we spend raising Autumn is very chaotic,' she told Mashable.
'I wanted to illustrate what was done but also how it felt. I could elicit a more visceral feeling with that — it could help illustrate a sense of reality.'
She also wanted to highlight how important parental leave is.
'Not to make too much of a political statement here, but when our society doesn't support parental leave, to many parents who might be struggling it's like saying, "Oh, I don't see you. I don’t see the struggle that you're having right now,"' she said.
'This is my perspective. Your relationship with your kid — I can love Autumn and not necessarily love parenting in the way that it shows up on Instagram,' she went on.
'I think part of what the data helps with is helping people remember that it actually is work. Parenting is a great privilege, and I am so appreciative that we get to partake in it. And it's still work.'
