Editors' Favorite App: "iGrounded" - This is a fun way to punish – er, parent! Spin the “Wheel of Consequences” or choose between three doors of discipline (and you can edit the punishments). $2.99.

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Welcome to the world of iParenting. The iPhone isn't just a must-have accessory for 20-something professionals anymore. It's a digital diaper bag, stuffed with ways to spruce up, streamline and drag the ancient art of parenting into the new decade.

"If you can make a parent's life even a little bit easier, that's huge," says Ken Denmead, a technology blogger for Wired magazine and author of a new book on family-friendly tech projects. "And if you can do it in a way that's both cool and convenient, that's even better. The iPhone does just that. You're looking at the next generation of parenting tools."

The Mother of Invention
Back in 2008, Darren Andes was a web developer at a major financial firm in New York. Then the markets tanked, his firm went under and he needed a back-up plan. He also needed a better way to keep track of his then 1-year-old daughter.

"I would come home and the nanny would have this sheet of paper filled out about how my daughter slept, when she ate, what she did," Andes says. "Maybe it's just the computer geek in me, but I figured there had to be a better way to do this."

	Moms with kids make up almost a third of all iPhone users.

So Andes jumped into the world of iPhone development. It started with "Baby Tracker: Nursing," which debuted in 2008 for moms who wanted to record and track their feeding sessions. (The main screen's options are "left" and "right" and Andes admits he learned more about nursing than he ever cared to know). Then came "Baby Tracker: Diapers," and then "Total Baby Tracker," the mother of all baby scrapbooks.

The app, which took Andes a year to make, lets parents record when their child sleeps, eats, takes a bath, laughs, burps, speaks, walks or does just about anything else. Parents can graph the data or export daily logs to their computers.

It joins the ranks of thousands of other apps designed to do one thing: make parents' lives easier. One lets users create a grocery list, complete with UPC codes and aisle numbers for easy shopping trips, and yet another turns the iPhone into an on-the-go baby monitor; if baby wakes up and trips the alarm, the app automatically calls a preset phone number to alert mom and dad. A "digital pillbox" app helps parents keep track of their kids' medicine regimens.

The best apps, Andes says, are designed by parents themselves, giving new meaning to the old saying about necessity being the mother of invention.

"It's guys like myself who have kids and think 'Wouldn't it be cool if there were a better, tech-ier way to be a parent?'" Andes says. "So we're making one."

Mom's Market Power
In the '90s, advertisers went gaga over "soccer moms," middle- and upper-class mothers who were socially savvy, well-connected to their communities and involved in household decision-making.