Why NaniNani stays calm

every age · Updated 2026-10-02

I built NaniNani to take stress off you, not to hand you one more thing to be graded on.

Every time it shows is the middle of a window, never an appointment: children aren't trains, and the science of sleep describes windows, not points. (A tide, never a deadline.)

When something is normal for your child's age, like scattered sleep in the first weeks before any day–night rhythm has formed, it says so first, before any suggestion.

It describes your child, never you: no streaks, no scores, no alarm red, no notifications pulling you back.

Your child's cues outrank every number on the screen. The app proposes, your child decides, and you referee.

Every sentence here passes one test, because how a moment reads costs a tired parent more than the moment itself:

Read at 3 a.m., after the fourth waking, does it lower your shoulders or raise them?

More in the guide: What this app will never do.

Where this comes from

Alexander Borbély, "A two process model of sleep regulation", Human Neurobiology 1:195–204 (1982). The original Process S / Process C model this app's engine implements.
David Kennaway et al., melatonin ontogeny studies (1992, 1996). No diurnal melatonin rhythm in the first weeks; rhythm observable ~9–12 weeks, steady ~13–15 weeks.
Arthur Parmelee et al., "Sleep patterns of the newborn" (1961). The 24-hour rest-activity pattern emerges ~week 6 and is definite only after week 12.
Jodi Mindell et al., app-logged infant sleep dataset, 156,989 sessions (2016). First three months: sleep bouts under 3.5 h scattered across the whole 24 hours.
My own dataset: 671 days, 2,181 hand-logged sleep sessions of one child, month 1 to month 22, used to fit and validate the engine. The honest scorecard, losses included, is in the notebook.
Richard Lazarus & Susan Folkman, Stress, Appraisal, and Coping (1984). Stress is the appraisal of an event, not the event itself; the framing of ambiguous information decides its emotional cost.
Tracy Jones & Ronald Prinz, "Potential roles of parental self-efficacy in parent and child adjustment: a review", Clinical Psychology Review 25:341–363 (2005). Parental self-efficacy — the belief "I can read my child and handle this" — as a protective factor for both parent and child outcomes.