Welcome, I'm Your Friend With The Baby!

Socialise, share, and get friendly help and support for you and your little ones

OK, so what's this all about?

Having a baby is the most amazing thing; a miracle, which changes your life in more ways than you ever would have imagined, but it's hard. Very hard.

There will be times when no amount of preparation will help, and where nothing seems to make any sense; where something that was perfectly fine yesterday, suddenly isn't today. It's relentless, and it's very easy to become overwhelmed.

You'll never have been so tired, and everyone you meet, whether they've had children of their own or not, will offer advice, and tell you what you should be doing, and how it must be done; but every baby's different, as is your situation, and times change. What was good advice just a couple of years ago, may not be now, and whilst people are mostly just trying to be helpful, being bombarded with all this, at times contradictory advice, can be the exact opposite of helpful, and make us feel like we're being bossed around.

Your Friend With The Baby doesn't like bossy people; people who'll tell you that you "must", "should" or "have" to do something. What's much more helpful is when someone just tells you what worked for them, and how they overcame challenges encountered on their journey, without expecting that it will work for everyone, or possibly even anyone else.

Sure, there really are things that you must, should, or have to do, but where that's the case it's important that we back this up with links to official, trusted sources, and ideally have input from verified professionals working in the relevant areas

What will you find here?

• A safe and secure place to chat with people
• Somewhere to find parenting tips from others, and to share your own
• Interesting articles written by parents
• An area to swap, give away, or sell baby items
• Groups for chatting with your friends, or maybe just person to person, along with general public ones to drop into where the conversation is focussed on particular topics of interest
• A way to create and host your own groups, helping you bring like-minded people together, so you can share your experiences and discuss the things that interest you
• Links to official sources for useful information, and where you can get help and support

How is this different to other parenting or Social Media sites?

• We have a system for verifying users who work in the fields of education, healthcare, psychology, law etc., so you know who you're interacting with, and can make an informed decision about the advice they are offering
• An easy way to flag content which is inappropriate, or which you feel is being bossy; with bossy people getting sent to the "naughty step" for a while to think about what they've done
• For those interested in writing an article to be published, we offer support such as proof reading, and can providing feedback, or we can even work with you, possibly pairing you up with someone who can help you to get your thoughts down, and prepare articles ready to publish. We want content written by real people, not professional journalists, and know that it can be nerve wracking; not everyone will know where to start, and we really want to help you tell your story, because it's important

Privacy

Whilst you're completely free to browse everything that's shared with the public on this site without providing any information whatsoever, if you want to get properly involved, you'll need to provide certain information in order to interact with this site, but we'll keep this to only what's absolutely necessary.

Your profile includes an email address, which is necessary to uniquely identify you, and for things like resetting passwords, plus it will allow us to get in touch if necessary regarding your account, but this will never be shared with anyone else, or even made visible anywhere on the site or in the app.

For legal, audit, performance monitoring, and troubleshooting purposes, we record details of all access made via the website and app, including things like your IP address and the time of each interaction. If you are logged in, then this access information will be associated with your account, however even anonymous access will be logged. This information may be used by our technical teams to ensure that everything is working well, and by our support staff to help identify the cause of any issues you may be experiencing. If required to do so by law, and only where necessary, and where due process has been followed, we may provide very specific information to law enforcement agencies. In such cases, no direct access will be given to our systems will not be provided, and only the specifically requested information will be sent, via methods which we can be confident are secure.

Advertising

The website and app have been designed and built in a way which ensures running costs are as low as possible, whilst still making sure everything is secure, and not limiting the features we're able to offer now, or in the future.

We want everyone to have access to the help and support that we just didn't think was there when our little'un came into this world a few years ago, and to provide this without any barriers to entry, especially financial.

Of course, running something like this costs money, and whilst we're happy to cover the costs ourselves whilst we launch, and as we look for feedback, make improvements, fix things, and work on new features; at some point we're going to need to find a way for Your Friend With The Baby to cover its own costs.

The most obvious way to do that is by introducing advertising, and whilst we understand that not everyone wants to see this (we're really not big fans of this ourselves) it's probably the most straightforward way for us to cover the costs without having to charge our users.

In future, we may look at a subscription scheme which would, for a small fee each month or year, allow us to provide you with a completely ad-free experience, but we need to work out how to do this effectively, and whether anyone would even be interested in such an option.

There are "Ad Blockers" available, which will hide any advertising on the websites you visit, but please, consider not using these whilst visiting Your Friend With The Baby. If we do go down the route of showing advertising on the site and in the app, it'll be because we need to money that it can bring in to keep the site going, but I'm hopeful we can find a way to prevent this from interfering with your enjoyment, and the support and information we're hoping to provide to parents, children, and their wider families and friends who are part of the journey.