Most parents who start thinking about keeping a care log hit the same wall almost immediately.
They know they should do it. They understand why it matters. They open their phone, or find a notebook, and then they sit there wondering: what exactly am I supposed to write?
It is not a silly question. Nobody teaches you this. There is no course for it. So this post is going to answer it as plainly as possible.

Why your entries matter more than you think
From October 2026, reassessments resume under the new Kahui Tu Kaha framework. NASC coordinators will be looking at the whole picture of your whanau member’s life across four dimensions: their physical health, their emotional wellbeing, their connections to whanau and community, and their sense of identity and purpose.
That is Te Whare Tapa Wha in practice. And it is a lot to communicate in a single meeting.

A care log builds that picture for you, one entry at a time. By the time you sit down with your coordinator, you are not relying on memory or hoping you say the right things. You have evidence.

What to write: a simple structure
You do not need full sentences. You do not need to write an essay. Four things, a couple of minutes, and you are done.
– What happened. One or two lines about the day. It can be unremarkable. “Quiet day, good appetite, spent time outside” is a perfectly good entry. So is “Hard night. Three episodes of distress. Very little sleep for either of us.”
– How the person was feeling. This is the part most people skip and it is the most important. Assessors see behaviour. What they are trying to understand is the wellbeing underneath it. If your son was anxious all morning, write that. If your daughter was proud of something she managed to do, write that too.
– What support was needed. Not clinical language. Just the reality. “Helped with getting up, breakfast, and showering. Needed prompting through most of the morning” is enough.
– Anything that changed or stood out. A new medication. A fall. A win at physio. A difficult appointment. An unusually good day. These moments are easy to forget in the rush of daily life. Written down, they become a timeline that tells a real story.

That is the whole structure. Most entries take under three minutes once you are in the habit.

The detail that changes outcomes
Here is something that surprises a lot of families when they first hear it.
A verbal account of how hard things have been carries much less weight in a review conversation than a documented record. Not because assessors do not believe you. But because documentation is specific and memory is general.
“He struggles a lot at night” is a general statement. “He had 14 nights of disturbed sleep in March, with an average of two episodes per night, and his daytime anxiety was noticeably higher in the days that followed” is evidence.

That second version does not come from memory. It comes from a log.

What about ordinary days
Quiet days count just as much as hard ones.
A run of ordinary entries establishes your baseline. When a difficult week follows two weeks of calm, the contrast is visible. When things improve after a change in support, that is visible too. The whole picture is only possible if you are recording consistently, not just when something goes wrong.
If you miss a day, do not try to reconstruct it. Just pick up from where you are. Consistent over time is what matters. Perfect is not required.

One thing to keep in mind
Your records belong to your whanau. Not to any agency or provider.
If a support worker leaves, if an agency closes, if you move regions, your log should come with you. Keep it somewhere you control.
That is one of the principles we built MyLog around from the beginning. Every entry you make is yours, searchable, and there when you need it.
Seven months of consistent daily entries before October 2026 gives you more than 200 data points. That is a powerful document to walk into a review with.

Start your free 14-day trial at mylog.co.nz