Skylight, Maple, and the search to repair the American household’s calendars

There are issues you are able to do to organize your self for parenthood: Read the books, take the lessons, arrange a university fund. Nothing can really put together you for the overwhelm.

More particularly, no person tells you ways exhausting it’s to maintain up with the logistical calls for and bureaucratic bloat. If deciding what to eat for dinner was annoying earlier than kids, strive meal planning for every week with a household. There are chores to do, college emails to reply, journeys to plan, payments to pay, and solely so many minutes within the day.

Running a family has change into akin to working a small enterprise for a lot of Americans. So it’s no shock {that a} cottage trade has cropped as much as help these fledgling households utilizing a variety of instruments borrowed from work tradition. Offering every little thing from AI-powered assistants to wall-mounted touchscreens, these tech firms promise to offer your loved ones with its personal command heart or working system — a software-based resolution to the societal drawback of parenting whereas overwhelmed.

The want for such a repair has cropped up because the calls for of parenting have escalated. A 2025 report from the Office of the Surgeon General confirmed that almost half of American parents said that “most days their stress is completely overwhelming.” Women have a tendency to hold extra of the psychological load. The overwhelming majority of oldsters in opposite-sex households say the mother spends more time managing schedules, in line with a Pew Research Center ballot printed in 2023. A separate examine discovered that moms, on common, did 71 percent of the cognitive labor at house — baby care, cleansing, scheduling, funds, managing relationships — whereas males did simply 29 p.c.

“This work of organizing the family is work, and it’s falling on women, particularly in different-sex couples,” mentioned Allison Daminger, an assistant sociology professor on the University of Wisconsin-Madison and creator of the upcoming e-book What’s on Her Mind: The Mental Load of Family Life.

There’s no reduction in sight for many households. The cost of child care has steadily elevated lately, and most working parents do not have access to paid family leave. An app received’t remedy these coverage challenges, nevertheless it would possibly make a drained father or mother’s day barely extra 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,” mentioned Brigid Schulte, director of the Better Life Lab at New America and creator of Overwhelmed: Work, Love, and Play When No One Has the Time.

“Are these apps the answer? No, they’re not,” Schulte informed 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 expertise attempting out many of those new instruments. The touchscreen in my kitchen is just not paying for pre-school. However, I’m in no place to run for Congress and champion the trigger, as a result of I nonetheless need to make a pediatrician appointment, schedule a playdate, and plan the subsequent week’s value of household meals.

But do you want a $600 household command heart?

My baby is just not but 2, however my spouse and I already really feel the pressure of administrative overload. And we discovered the exhausting manner that simply creating a brand new Google Calendar wasn’t going to chop it, the place household obligations get combined in with work conferences and private to-dos, turning the entire thing right into a soup of confusion.

That led me to take a look at devoted household calendar apps, like Maple, earlier than exploring full fledged household command facilities, like Skylight.

The thought of utilizing software program to assist households keep organized is just not new. Some 20 years in the past, a few former Microsoft staff created an internet household organizer referred to as Cozi, which remains to be round right now. It wasn’t till the pandemic that the idea actually took off, although.

Skylight, makers of the touchscreen in my kitchen, began out as a digital image body firm over a decade in the past. In September 2020, the corporate made a significant pivot towards constructing a household command heart with the launch of the Skylight Calendar, which syncs with current digital calendars, like Google Calendar and Outlook, however places your entire household on one display. There are additionally tabs for a to-do checklist, a grocery checklist, and a meal plan, all of that are additionally obtainable on a cellular app. Skylight has since added options, like a gamified chores tab for teenagers, and an AI assistant called Sidekick that converts emails and even footage of issues like fliers and recipes into calendar occasions and meal plans. The 27-inch Cal Max, launched final yr, prices as much as $600, plus a further $80 a yr for entry to all of the options.

Hot on Skylight’s heels is an app referred to as Maple, which launched in February 2021. Initially described as “the back office of every family,” Maple has gone by a number of iterations, together with one which enabled dad and mom to promote “ready made plans” to different households, however the app is primarily a household calendar powered by to-do lists. You can create to-dos, assign them to family members, after which see a schedule of every little thing that must be performed. There’s additionally a meal planner, a household messaging platform, and a undertaking administration characteristic that’s surprisingly good at planning birthday events. It prices $40 a year to sync exterior calendars, eliminate advertisements, and entry AI options.

I do know what you’re pondering: Google and Apple software program can do plenty of these things without cost. And you’d be proper. There’s no have to pay for a devoted household calendar app, if you wish to bootstrap current software program, together with what you utilize for work, to remain organized.

Tech-savvy dad and mom have been doing this for years. In 2016, a dad in Sweden went semi-viral for running a blog about using Slack to keep track of his family and helped encourage The Atlantic story, “The Slackification of the American home.” Emily Oster, the economist turned parenting guru, canonized the idea in The Family Firm, a e-book about utilizing off-the-shelf enterprise software program like Asana to maintain her household organized a number of years in the past. Just final yr, the New York Times spoke to a lot of dad and mom, a lot of whom labored within the enterprise capital or crypto industries, that use undertaking administration instruments 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, mentioned 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, equally informed me that his firm’s job is “building a calendar that’s all encompassing for seven days a week of our life as a working parent.” Maple additionally invitations its customers to hitch a Slack neighborhood, the place they’ll weigh in on options they love or hate or try upcoming releases, like Maple’s new net app, which is ready to launch this fall.

Skylight and Maple are the 2 household assistants I’ve used essentially the most, however they’re hardly the one ones. Hearth sells its personal big touchscreen calendar in your kitchen, and Jam appears to be like like a Maple clone with some Gen Z design aptitude. Apps like Milo and Ohai lean into the AI of all of it, promising to make use of chatbots to maintain your loved ones organized. There are additionally tech firms attempting to attach dad and mom. Honeycomb says it helps dad and mom “share the mental and logistical load” through group chats and good calendars, and the Sandwich Club is an AI-powered recommendation platform that lets different dad and mom weigh in in your questions.

Together, these firms comprise a burgeoning new trade, known as famtech. There’s even an trade affiliation devoted to selling its pursuits, drumming up funding, and pushing for coverage modifications for caregivers, like paid household depart. “Liken it to where financial services has fintech, we look at the care economy as having famtech as its innovation sector,” mentioned Anna Steffany, govt director of FamTech.org, “and we look at family technology as all things addressing the caregiving space.” One development report, which Steffany contributed to, values the care economy at nearly $650 billion.

It’s straightforward to really feel skeptical a few single app or kitchen-based touchscreen that guarantees to make dad and mom’ lives simpler. Heck, I’ve been utilizing each for a number of weeks now, and it’s definitely good to not need to textual content my spouse each time there’s a change within the schedule or to remind me who’s on preschool pickup responsibility that day.

Then once more, I’m additionally beginning to marvel if utilizing a parenting app simply means I’m giving up extra knowledge about my household within the providers of higher focused advertisements. (The privateness insurance policies of each Maple and Skylight say the businesses could accumulate and share private knowledge with third events.) I’m additionally acutely conscious that having a brand new device to handle my household means I’ve acquired yet one more factor to handle.

“When you’re trying to integrate across so many different apps and systems and interfaces, the real cost benefit ratio can get thrown off,” mentioned 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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