There are things you can do to prepare for paternity: Read the books, take classes, create a university fund. Nothing can really prepare for overvaluation.
More specifically, nobody tells how difficult it is to keep up with logistics demands and bureaucratic swelling. If deciding what to eat for dinner was annoying before children, try to plan meals for a week with a family. There are tasks to do, emails to respond, trips to plan, invoices to pay and only so many minutes in the day.
Directing a family has become similar to administering a small business for many Americans. Therefore, it is not surprising that an artisanal industry has emerged to support those incipient families that use a variety of tools of work culture. By offering everything from AI attendees to tactile screens mounted on the wall, these technological companies promise to promise their family their own operating system of the command center: a solution based on software to the social problem or the raising of the children while exceeding.
The need for such a solution has arisen as the demands of breeding the children have intensified. A 2025 report from the general surgeon office showed that almost half of the American parents said that “most of the days their stress is completely overwhelming.” Women tend to carry more than mental burden. The vast majority of parents in opposite sex households say that the mother spends more time managing schedules, according to a survey of the PEW Research Center published in 2023. A separate study found that mothers, on average, made 71 percent of cognitive work in the home: child care, cleaning, programming, finance, administrative relations, while men only had 29 percent.
It is not surprising that an artisanal industry has emerged to support those incipient families that use a variety of tools caused by work culture.
“This family organization work is work, and you are falling in love with women, particularly in pairs of different sexes,” said Allison Daminger, an assistant professor of Sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and author of the next book What about mind? The mental burden of family life.
There is no relief in sight for most families. The cost of child care has constantly increased in recent years, and most parents who work have no access to the paid family license. An application won solves these policy challenges, but could make a tired father day a little more aerodynamic.
“We have some of the most familiar and practical hostile public policies in the workplace of any high -income country, and parents are absolutely tied for time and money,” said Brigid Schulte, director of The Better Life Lab in New America and author of Overvalued: work, love and play when nobody has time.
“Are these applications the answer? No, they are not,” Schulte told me. “At most, they are auxiliary. They can help people handle, keep their heads above the water, but the real solutions that we need much larger than any application.”
That was my experience testing many of these new tools. The touch screen in my kitchen is not paying for preschool. However, I am not in a position to run for Congress and defend the cause, because I still have to make a pediatrician appointment, schedule a game date and plan the family meals of next week.
But do you need a $ 600 family command center?
My son is not 2 years old yet, but my wife and I already feel the tension of administrative overload. And we learned in the difficult way that simply creating a new Google calendar was not going to cut it, where family bbligations are mixed with work meetings and personal tasks, turning all things into a confusion soup.
That led me to see dedicated family calendar applications, such as Maple, before exploring full family command centers, such as Skylight.
The idea of using software to help families stay organized is not new. About 20 years ago, a couple of former Microsoft employees created an online family organizer called Cozi, which still exists today. It was not the pandemic that the concept really took off, he thought.
I am not in a position to run for Congress and defend the cause, because I still have to make a pediatrician appointment, schedule a game date and plan the Horth of Family next week.
Skylight, manufacturers of the touch screen in my kitchen, began as a digital image frame company approximately a decade. In September 2020, the company made a significant pivot to build a family command with the launch of the Calendar de Tragalía, which synchronizes with existing digital calendars, such as Google Calendar and Outlook, but places a whole family screen. There are also eyelashes for a list of pending tasks, a list of groceries and a meal plan, all or that are also available in a mobile application. Since then, Skylight has added features, such as a tasks of gamified tasks for children, and an assistant of the so -called Sidekick that converts emails and even images of things such as flyers and recipes in calendar events and food plans. The 27 -inch Max lime, released last year, costs up to $ 600, plus $ 80 additional per year to access all functions.
Hot on Skylight’s Heels is an application called Maple, which was launched in February 2021. Initially described as “the Back of each family”, Maple has passed through some iterations, including one that allowed one that allowed families to “sell” the sales plans “to the plans to sell” plans “plans” plans “to sell plans” plans plans a family calendar fed with lists Assign them to family members and then see a schedule of everything that must be done.
I know what you are thinking: Google and Apple Software can do many of these things for free. And you would be right. It is not necessary to pay a dedicated family calendar application, if you want to start the existing software, including what you use for work, to stay organized.
Technology expert parents have been doing this for years. In 2016, a father in Sweden was semi-viral to blog about the use of his family’s track and helped inspire the history of the Atlantic, “The Slackification of the American Home.” Emily Oster, the economist turned into the children’s guru, canonized the concept in The family business” A book about the use of business software ready to use as Asana to keep the family rehabilitation organized a few years ago. Last year, the New York Times spoke with several parents, many of whom worked in risk capital or in cryptographic industries, which use project management tools such as Trello and the notion to lead their families as new companies.
“Tasks and tasks, lists of pending tasks, lists of groceries: there are applications that do those individual things better than us,” said Michael Segal, co -founder and CEO of Skylight, in an interview. “It is more convenient to do everything in the place where you are going to administer the family and home.”
Michael Perry, co -founder and CEO of Maple, told me in a similar way that the company’s work is “to build a calendar that is found for seven days a week of our life as a hardworking father.” Maple also invites its users to join a Slack community, where they can evaluate the characteristics they love or hate or see the next releases, such as the new Maple web application, which will launch this fall.
The skylight and the maple are the two family assistants that I have used the most, but they are not the only ones. Hearth Sells is the giant touch screen calendar for its kitchen, and the jam looks like an Arce clone with some design style of Gen Z. Applications such as Milo and Ohai are inclined in the AI of everything, promising to use chatbots to keep their family organized. There are also technological companies that try to connect parents. Honeycomb says that it helps parents “share the mental and logistics load” through group chats and smart calendars, and the Sandwich Club is an advice platform with AI that allows other parents to evaluate their questions.
Together, these companies comprise a new Burgery industry, known as Famtech. There is even an industry association dedicated to promoting their interests, staggering investment and pressing for policy changes for caregivers, such as the paid family license. “Completing it with the place where financial services have Fintech, we consider that the economy of attention has Famtech as its innovation sector,” said Anna Steffany, executive director of Famtech.org, “and we consider that family technology is all that addresses the care space.” A trend report, to which Steffany contributed, values the economy of attention at almost $ 650 billion.
It is easy to feel skeptical about a single application or tactile screen based on the kitchen that promises to facilitate the life of parents. Devils, I have been using both for a few weeks, and it is certainly good to have to send text messages to my wife every time there is a change in the schedule or remind me who is in the preschool collection duty that day.
On the other hand, I am also starting to ask if using a parents application means that I am renouncing more information about my family in the best directed ads services. (Maple and Skylight privacy policies say that companies can collect and share personal data with third parties). I am also very aware that having a new tool to manage my family I have something else to manage.
“When you try to integrate into so many different applications, systems and interfaces, the real-cost benefits ratio can be discarded,” said Daminger, a UW-Madison professor. “Sometimes we are trying to facilitate things, but in the end, we really end up creating new forms of work.”
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