Family Management: A Business Approach and Technological Solutions

Family management has become like running a small business for many Americans, leading to the rise of a home-grown industry that supports these emerging families using a set of tools borrowed from business culture. These tech companies, offering everything from AI-powered assistants to wall-mounted touchscreens, promise to equip your family with its own command center or operating system – a software-based solution to the societal problem of raising children while feeling overwhelmed.

Escalating Demands of Parenthood

The need for such a solution emerged with the escalating demands of parenthood. An August 2024 report by the Surgeon General's office, based on a 2023 American Psychological Association survey, showed that nearly half of American parents said "most days their stress was completely overwhelming." Women tend to bear more of the mental load; the vast majority of parents in heterosexual households say mothers spend more time managing schedules, according to a Pew Research Center survey published in 2023. A separate study found that mothers, on average, performed 71 percent of the cognitive labor in the home – childcare, cleaning, scheduling, finances, relationship management – while men performed only 29 percent.

Expert Perspectives and Personal Experiences

"The work of family organization is work, and it falls on women, especially in heterosexual couples," said Allison Daminger, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and author of the forthcoming book What's on Her Mind: The Mental Load of Family Life. There's no relief in sight for most families; the cost of childcare has steadily risen in recent years, and most working parents do not receive paid family leave. An app may not solve these political challenges, but it could make a tired parent's day simpler.

"We have some of the most anti-family public policies and workplace practices of any high-income country, and parents are utterly 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 solution? No, they're not," Schulte told me. "At most, they're just Band-Aids. They can help people manage, keep their heads above water, but the real solutions we need are much bigger than any app."

This was my experience trying out many of these new tools. The touchscreen in my kitchen doesn't pay for daycare. Yet, I'm not in a position to run for Congress and advocate for the cause, because I still need to schedule pediatrician appointments, organize playdates, and plan the family's meals for the upcoming week. My child isn't even two yet, but my wife and I already feel the pressure of the excessive administrative burden. And we learned the hard way that simply creating a new Google Calendar wouldn't suffice, as family commitments mix with work meetings and personal tasks, turning everything into chaos. This led me to check out dedicated Maple family calendar apps, before exploring full-fledged family command centers, like Skylight.

History of Family Organization Tools

The idea of using software to help families stay organized isn't new. About 20 years ago, a couple of former Microsoft employees created an online family organizer called Cozi, which still exists today. But the concept didn't truly take off until after the pandemic.

Prominent Family Management Solutions: Skylight

Skylight, the maker of the touchscreens in my kitchen, started as a digital photo frame company more than a decade ago. In September 2020, the company made a significant pivot towards building a family command center with the launch of Skylight Calendar, which syncs with existing digital calendars, such as Google Calendar and Outlook, but puts the entire family on one screen. There are also tabs for to-do lists, grocery lists, and meal plans, all also available on the mobile app. Skylight has since added features, such as a segmented chores tab for children, and an AI assistant called Sidekick that turns emails and even photos of things like flyers and recipes into calendar events and meal plans. The 27-inch Cal Max, launched last year, costs up to $600, plus an additional $80 annually for access to all AI features.

Prominent Family Management Solutions: Maple

The Maple app, launched in February 2021, closely follows Skylight. Initially described as "the back office for every family," Maple has gone through several iterations, including a version that enabled parents to sell "pre-made plans" to other families, but the app is essentially a family calendar supported by to-do lists. You can create tasks, assign them to family members, and then see a schedule of everything that needs to be done. There's also a meal plan, a family messaging platform, and a surprisingly good project management feature for planning birthday parties. It costs $40 annually to sync external calendars, eliminate ads, and access AI features.

Alternatives and Advanced Solutions

I know what you're thinking: Google and Apple software can do many of these things for free. And you're right. There's no need to pay for a dedicated family calendar app if you want to use existing software, including what you use for work, to stay organized. Tech-obsessed parents have been doing this for years. In 2016, a Swedish dad blogger went semi-viral for blogging about using Slack to track his family and helped inspire The Atlantic's story, "The Slackification of the American Family." Emily Oster, the economist turned parenting expert, codified the concept in her book 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 with several parents, many working in venture capital or crypto industries, who use project management tools like Trello and Notion to manage their families like startups.

"Chores and routines, to-do lists, grocery lists: there are apps that do these individual things better than we do," said Michael Segal, co-founder and CEO of Skylight, in an interview. "It's more convenient to do it all in the place you go to manage the family and home." Michael Perry, co-founder and CEO of Maple, similarly said his company's mission is to "build a seven-day-a-week comprehensive calendar of our lives as working parents." Maple also invites its users to join a Slack community, where they can give feedback on features they like or dislike or get a glimpse of upcoming releases, such as Maple's new web app, slated for this fall.

Skylight and Maple are the family assistants I've used most, but they're not the only ones. Hearth sells its own giant touchscreen calendar for your kitchen, and Jam looks like a carbon copy of Maple with some millennial design touches. Apps like Milo and Ohai tend to use AI for everything, 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 Sandwich Club is an AI-powered advisory platform that lets other parents weigh in on your questions.

The Emerging "Fam-Tech" Industry

Together, these companies form a thriving new industry, referred to as famtech (family technology). There's even an industry association dedicated to promoting its interests, raising investments, and pushing for policy changes for care workers, such as paid family leave. "It's almost where financial services has fintech, we look at the care economy as having famtech as an innovation sector," said Anna Stefani, executive director of FamTech.org, "and we look at family tech as anything that surrounds the care space." One trend report, which Stefani contributed to, estimates the care economy to be worth about $650 billion.

Limitations and Concerns About "Fam-Tech" Solutions

It's easy to feel skeptical about a single app or a kitchen touchscreen promising to make parents' lives easier. I've even used both for a few weeks now, and it's certainly nice not having to text my wife every time the schedule changes or to remind me who's on daycare pickup that day.

Then again, I started wondering if using a parenting app just means I'm feeding more data about my family into the service of better targeted ads. (The privacy policies of both Maple and Skylight state that companies may collect and share personal data with third parties.) I'm also keenly aware that having a new tool to manage my family means I have one more thing to manage.

"When you're trying to integrate across many different applications, systems, and interfaces, the true cost-benefit ratio can get out of whack," said Daminger, the University of Wisconsin-Madison professor. "Sometimes we try to make things easier, but ultimately, we actually end up creating new forms of labor."