There are things you can do to prepare yourself for parenthood: Read the books, take the classes, set up a college fund. Nothing can truly prepare you for the overwhelm.
More specifically, nobody tells you how hard it is to keep up with the logistical demands and bureaucratic bloat. If deciding what to eat for dinner was annoying before children, try meal planning for a week with a family. There are chores to do, school emails to answer, trips to plan, bills to pay, and only so many minutes in the day.
Running a family has become akin to running a small business for many Americans. So it’s no surprise that a cottage industry has cropped up to support those fledgling families using a range of tools borrowed from work culture. Offering everything from AI-powered assistants to wall-mounted touchscreens, these tech companies promise to provide your family with its own command center or operating system — a software-based solution to the societal problem of parenting while overwhelmed.
The need for such a fix has cropped up as the demands of parenting have escalated. A 2025 report from the Office of the Surgeon General showed that nearly half of American parents said that “most days their stress is completely overwhelming.” Women tend to carry more of the mental load. The vast majority of parents in opposite-sex households say the mother spends more time managing schedules, according to a Pew Research Center poll published in 2023. A separate study found that mothers, on average, did 71 percent of the cognitive labor at home — child care, cleaning, scheduling, finances, managing relationships — while men did just 29 percent.
It’s no surprise that a cottage industry has cropped up to support those fledgling families using a range of tools borrowed from work culture.
“This work of organizing the family is work, and it’s falling on women, particularly in different-sex couples,” said Allison Daminger, an assistant sociology professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and author of the upcoming book What’s on Her Mind: The Mental Load of Family Life.
There’s no relief in sight for most families. The cost of child care has steadily increased in recent years, and most working parents do not have access to paid family leave. An app won’t solve these policy challenges, but it might make a tired parent’s day slightly more streamlined.
“We have some of the most family hostile public policies and workplace practices of any high-income country, and parents are absolutely strapped for time and money,” said Brigid Schulte, director of the Better Life Lab at New America and author of Overwhelmed: Work, Love, and Play When No One Has the Time.
“Are these apps the answer? No, they’re not,” Schulte told me. “At most they’re Band-Aids. They can help people manage, keep their heads above water, but the real solutions we need are much bigger than any app.”
That was my experience trying out many of these new tools. The touchscreen in my kitchen is not paying for pre-school. However, I’m in no position to run for Congress and champion the cause, because I still have to make a pediatrician appointment, schedule a playdate, and plan the next week’s worth of family meals.
But do you need a $600 family command center?
My child is not yet 2, but my wife and I already feel the strain of administrative overload. And we learned the hard way that just creating a new Google Calendar wasn’t going to cut it, where family obligations get mixed in with work meetings and personal to-dos, turning the whole thing into a soup of confusion.
That led me to check out dedicated family calendar apps, like Maple, before exploring full fledged family command centers, like Skylight.
The idea of using software to help families stay organized is not new. Some 20 years ago, a couple of former Microsoft employees created an online family organizer called Cozi, which is still around today. It wasn’t until the pandemic that the concept really took off, though.
I’m in no position to run for Congress and champion the cause, because I still have to make a pediatrician appointment, schedule a playdate, and plan the next week’s worth of family meals.
Skylight, makers of the touchscreen in my kitchen, started out as a digital picture frame company over a decade ago. In September 2020, the company made a meaningful pivot toward building a family command center with the launch of the Skylight Calendar, which syncs with existing digital calendars, like Google Calendar and Outlook, but puts the entire family on one screen. There are also tabs for a to-do list, a grocery list, and a meal plan, all of which are also available on a mobile app. Skylight has since added features, like a gamified chores tab for kids, and an AI assistant called Sidekick that converts emails and even pictures of things like fliers and recipes into calendar events and meal plans. The 27-inch Cal Max, launched last year, costs up to $600, plus an additional $80 a year for access to all the features.
Hot on Skylight’s heels is an app called Maple, which launched in February 2021. Initially described as “the back office of every family,” Maple has gone through a few iterations, including one that enabled parents to sell “ready made plans” to other families, but the app is primarily a family calendar powered by to-do lists. You can create to-dos, assign them to members of the family, and then see a schedule of everything that needs to be done. There’s also a meal planner, a family messaging platform, and a project management feature that’s surprisingly good at planning birthday parties. It costs $40 a year to sync external calendars, get rid of ads, and access AI features.
I know what you’re thinking: Google and Apple software can do a lot of this stuff for free. And you’d be right. There’s no need to pay for a dedicated family calendar app, if you want to bootstrap existing software, including what you use for work, to stay organized.
Tech-savvy parents have been doing this for years. In 2016, a dad in Sweden went semi-viral for blogging about using Slack to keep track of his family and helped inspire The Atlantic story, “The Slackification of the American home.” Emily Oster, the economist turned parenting guru, canonized the concept in The Family Firm, a book about using off-the-shelf enterprise software like Asana to keep her family organized a few years ago. Just last year, the New York Times spoke to a number of parents, many of whom worked in the venture capital or crypto industries, that use project management tools like Trello and Notion to run their families like startups.
“Tasks and chores, to-do lists, grocery lists: There are apps that do those individual things better than we do,” Michael Segal, co-founder and CEO of Skylight, said in an interview. “It’s just more convenient to do it all in the place where you go to manage the family and home.”
Michael Perry, Maple’s co-founder and CEO, similarly told me that his company’s job is “building a calendar that’s all encompassing for seven days a week of our life as a working parent.” Maple also invites its users to join a Slack community, where they can weigh in on features they love or hate or check out upcoming releases, like Maple’s new web app, which is set to launch this fall.
Skylight and Maple are the two family assistants I’ve used the most, but they’re hardly the only ones. Hearth sells its own giant touchscreen calendar for your kitchen, and Jam looks like a Maple clone with some Gen Z design flair. Apps like Milo and Ohai lean into the AI of it all, promising to use chatbots to keep your family organized. There are also tech companies trying to connect parents. Honeycomb says it helps parents “share the mental and logistical load” via group chats and smart calendars, and the Sandwich Club is an AI-powered advice platform that lets other parents weigh in on your questions.
Together, these companies comprise a burgeoning new industry, referred to as famtech. There’s even an industry association dedicated to promoting its interests, drumming up investment, and pushing for policy changes for caregivers, like paid family leave. “Liken it to where financial services has fintech, we look at the care economy as having famtech as its innovation sector,” said Anna Steffany, executive director of FamTech.org, “and we look at family technology as all things addressing the caregiving space.” One trend report, which Steffany contributed to, values the care economy at nearly $650 billion.
It’s easy to feel skeptical about a single app or kitchen-based touchscreen that promises to make parents’ lives easier. Heck, I’ve been using both for a few weeks now, and it’s certainly nice not to have to text my wife every time there’s a change in the schedule or to remind me who’s on preschool pickup duty that day.
Then again, I’m also starting to wonder if using a parenting app just means I’m giving up more data about my family in the services of better targeted ads. (The privacy policies of both Maple and Skylight say the companies may collect and share personal data with third parties.) I’m also acutely aware that having a new tool to manage my family means I’ve got yet another thing to manage.
“When you’re trying to integrate across so many different apps and systems and interfaces, the real cost benefit ratio can get thrown off,” said Daminger, the UW-Madison professor. “Sometimes we’re trying to make things easier, but in the end, we actually end up just creating new forms of labor.”
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