Keeping a private diary as a parent
A few lines a day, kept for nobody but you, is one of the cheapest ways to notice how you are actually doing. Why it helps, how to keep it going when you have no time, and how to keep it genuinely private.
Updated 3 November 2026
Equal House does this for you — it measures how the household actually splits, then shares it out fairly.
Get the appParenting is mostly lived in the present tense. The week blurs; a bad Tuesday and a good Thursday become “it’s been a hard month”. A diary is the simplest way to get the detail back, and the detail is where you can do something about it. “Everything is awful” is not something you can act on. “Thursdays are awful, because that is swimming, the late shift and the bins” is.
Why a private one
A diary only works if you can be honest in it, and you can only be honest in something nobody else will read. That rules out a shared notes app, a family group chat and anything your partner can open, however good your relationship is. It is not about hiding things. It is that you will write differently if someone might read it, and the version you would write for an audience is not the useful one.
Private also means private from the tools you use to run the house. An app that measures how the work is shared has no business also reading the diary of the person who is unhappy with the answer.
Keeping it going when you have no time
- A few lines is enough. You are not writing a memoir. One sentence on what happened and one on how you felt is a good day’s entry.
- Use questions. A blank page is hard at 10pm. “What made you smile today?” or “What took more out of you than it should have?” is easy.
- Pick a time. Last thing at night, or in the car before you go in. A gentle daily reminder helps; a nagging one does not.
- Miss days without guilt. Write about yesterday today, or not at all. A diary with gaps is still a diary.
- Add a mood, if you like. Over a month, a row of moods shows a pattern faster than rereading every page.
What to do with it
Read back over a month every so often. Look for patterns, not verdicts: which days are hard, what comes before a good week, what you keep writing about. If you notice the same thing for weeks, such as being the one who always does bedtime, or never getting an evening, that is worth raising. Raise the pattern, not the diary. “I’ve noticed I haven’t had an evening off in a month” is a conversation; reading out your diary is an ambush.
If what you keep writing is that you are not coping, tell someone: your GP, a friend, or one of the UK helplines in our helplines page.
Doing it in Equal House
Equal House has a private diary, My Journal, under More → My Journal, on the free plan:
- A page a day. Open today again later and you add to the same page; write about a day you missed whenever you like.
- Three questions each day, such as “What made you smile today?”, with Different questions if none of them fit, and a mood if you want one.
- A daily reminder on your phone, if you turn it on, that skips any day you have already written and never shows anything you wrote.
- Sharing only when you choose. Share one day, a range of days or the whole diary as plain text, through your phone’s own Share menu, after Equal House asks first.
It stays on the device you wrote it on. Diary entries are not uploaded, not synced and not visible to anyone else in your household, including the household owner. That has a cost worth knowing: if you lose the phone or reinstall the app, they are gone, because there is no copy on a server.
On a computer, at app.equal.house, My Journal is kept in that browser only. It is separate from the diary on your phone, and clearing the site’s data in the browser deletes it.
The help page has the details: keep a private diary.
