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........

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