What to Keep Track of Before Your Child’s Asthma Appointment
If you’ve ever wondered what to track before your child’s asthma appointment, you’re not alone.
Intro
Asthma appointments can feel rushed and overwhelming, especially when trying to remember everything you wanted to bring up and questions you wanted to ask.
Many parents leave thinking of questions they meant to ask or specific details they forgot to mention. It’s not because you weren’t paying attention. It’s because when it comes to asthma, there are many ups and downs, changes over time, and memory isn’t always reliable weeks later.
Tracking a few key things ahead of an appointment can make conversations clearer, more focused, and more productive.
Here’s what actually matters.
1. Asthma Symptom Patterns over Time
Doctors aren’t only interested in whether your child had a bad day.
They’re looking for patterns over time. Patterns give important clues about what could be triggering asthma, how Asthma symptoms present, how well Asthma is being controlled.
Making notes and keeping track of these things can be extremely helpful to your provider when reviewing asthma:
How often symptoms occur (daily, weekly, only during illness)
Whether symptoms are worse at night
Exercise-related symptoms
Persistent coughing, even without wheezing
Symptoms that improve and then return
One isolated flare is less informative than repeated changes over time. Tracking asthma symptoms over time gives providers a clearer picture of overall control.
2. Rescue Inhaler Use (How Often Is Too Often?)
One of the most important things to track is rescue inhaler use.
Consider writing down or logging:
How many times the blue inhaler was used
Whether it provided quick relief
How long relief lasted
Any increase in use during illness or certain seasons
Frequent rescue inhaler use can signal that asthma may not be fully controlled — even if symptoms seem mild day to day.
Rescue Inhaler: How much is too much?
3. Illness Triggered Flares
You may be surprised to learn that viral illnesses are the most common trigger of asthma in young children. For many kids, illness may be the only consistent trigger. They may run, play, and sleep normally most of the year, but every time they catch a cold, asthma symptoms flare.
What Viral-Triggered Asthma Often Looks Like
When asthma is triggered by a viral illness, symptoms may:
Start 1–3 days into a cold
Worsen at night
Cause persistent coughing that lingers after other cold symptoms improve
Require more frequent use of a rescue inhaler
Lead to wheezing that wasn’t present earlier
May require urgent care to address symptoms and worsening shortness of breath
Take longer to fully settle compared to siblings without asthma
Sometimes the cold symptoms (runny nose, sore throat) improve within a week — but the cough and chest tightness continue for weeks.
When your child gets sick, consider noting:
Date illness began
When asthma symptoms started (if different from cold onset)
What symptoms appeared (cough, wheeze, shortness of breath)
How often rescue inhaler was needed
Whether nighttime symptoms increased
When symptoms fully resolved
All of these details are helpful for your healthcare provider to get a better idea of Asthma presentation and prevalence.
4. Changes to Care Plans
Appointments often include:
Medication adjustments
Referrals for diagnostic testing
Step-ups or step-downs in inhaled steroids
Changes to the asthma action plan
Writing these down helps you:
Remember why changes were made
Track whether adjustments helped
Identify patterns at the next follow-up
Asthma management is a process — not a single decision.
5. Questions That Came Up Between Visits
Between appointments, parents often notice:
New triggers
New symptom patterns
Concerns about medication use
Uncertainty about inhaler technique
Keep a journal or notes on your phone of your questions as they come up. This ensure that you have an on-going list of questions to bring with you to your next appointment, so nothing gets missed!
Why Tracking Asthma Symptoms Makes Appointments Easier
Asthma is rarely static. It changes with growth, seasons, illness, and environment.
Keeping track of Asthma symptoms, rescue inhaler use is helpful to:
Reduces guesswork on trying to remember when, how often and what happened over long periods of time.
Supports more productive conversations in appointments
Helps providers see patterns in asthma clearly and accurately
Builds confidence and reassurance in managing day-to-day care
Help parents feel less overwhelmed with trying to remember everything
It’s not about documenting everything perfectly. It’s about organizing what matters.
A Simple Way to Keep Asthma Information Organized
For families who want one organized place to track symptoms, appointments, and care plan changes, Thrive Pulmonary has developed a tool just for your. “ Seeing the Patterns in Asthma: A Daily Asthma Journal & Symptom Tracker for Parents” was created as a structured asthma resource designed specifically for parents managing childhood asthma.
Rather than functioning as a generic notebook, it’s organized around how asthma actually unfolds — with space to capture and display patterns, flare-ups, appointment notes, and care plan adjustments over time, in an easy to understand, visual way.
Developed by a Respiratory Therapist, Certified Respiratory Educator and by a Mom of a child with Asthma. It’s the tool I wish I had in the early day’s of Asthma.
Seeing the Patterns in Asthma: Daily Asthma Journal & Symptom Tracker for Parents. By: Janelle Nichols RRT. CRE.
👉 See the Thrive Asthma Tracker Here
Closing
Asthma appointments don’t have to feel rushed or uncertain.
When you can clearly see patterns, note changes, and bring organized information to visits, care decisions become more collaborative and confident.
Even small steps like writing things down and keeping track of Asthma as it shows up, can make asthma feel far less overwhelming.
