Skylight, Maple, and the quest to fix the America’s family calendars

There are things that you can do to prepare for parenting: read the books, take the classes and set up a college fund. Nothing can really prepare for the overwhelming.

In particular, nobody tells them how difficult it is to keep up with the logistical requirements and bureaucratic inflation. If you decide in front of children before dinner what to eat for dinner, try a family with a family planning with a family for a week. There are tasks to do, answer school -e emails, travel to plan, pay invoices and only so many minutes a day.

A family a small company is related to many Americans. So it is no surprise that a household industry has appeared to support those young families who use a number of tools that were borrowed from work culture. These tech companies offer everything from assistants with AI-powered assistants to wall mounted touchscreens and promise their family or their own command center or their own operating system-one software-based solution for the social problem of parenthood while he is overwhelmed.

The necessity of such a fixture has appeared because the requirements of parenthood have escalated. A report from 2025 from the general surgeon office showed that almost half of American parents said that “their stress on most days is completely overwhelming”. Women tend to carry more of the intellectual stress. The vast majority of parents in households to gender says this Mother spends more time to manage schedulesAccording to a PEW Research Center, which was published in 2023. A separate study showed that mothers on average, Has 71 percent of cognitive work At home – childcare, cleaning, planning, finance, administrative relationships – while men only made 29 percent.

“This work for the organization of the family is work and it falls on women, especially among different sexes,” said, said women said, “she said,” she said, “she said,” she said Allison DamingerDeputy sociology professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and author of the upcoming book What do you think?.

There is no relief in sight for most families. The Childcare costs has increased steadily in recent years, and Most working parents Do you have no access to paid family vacation. An app does not solve these political challenges, but it could make a tired parent day a little more optimized.

“We have some of the most familiar public guidelines and at the workplace in every country with high incomes, and the parents are absolutely strapped to time and money” Brigid SchulteDirector of the Better Life Lab at New America and author of Overwhelmed: work, love and game when nobody has the time.

“Are these apps the answer? No, they are not,” Schulte told me. “They are at most paving. They can help people keep their heads afloat, but the real solutions we need are much larger than any app.”

That was my experience to try many of these new tools. The touchscreen in my kitchen does not pay for preschool. However, I am unable to run for the congress and promote the matter because I still agree on a pediatric appointment, plan a game date and plan the meals of the next week.

But do you need a 600 dollar family command center?

My child is not yet 2, but my wife and I already feel the burden on the administrative overload. And we learned on the hard tour that creating a new Google calendar did not shorten him, where family obligations are mixed with working meetings and personal tasks and transforming the whole thing into a soup of confusion.

This prompted me to check committed family calendar apps how mapleBefore you explore full -fledged family command centers, how Skylight.

The idea of ​​using software to help families are not new. About 20 years ago, some former Microsoft employees created an online family organizer named CoziWhat is still there today. Only the pandemic really decreased.

The skylight, manufacturer of the touchscreen in my kitchen, began over a decade ago as a digital picture frame company. In September 2020 the company made a meaningful shoot Skylight calendarThe with existing digital calendars such as Google calendar and Outlook synchronized, but put the whole family on a screen. There are also tabs for a to-do list, a grocery list and a menu that is also available in a mobile app. Since then, Skylight has added functions, such as a “tasks” tab for children and one AI assistant named Sidekick This converts e -mails and even pictures of things such as leaflets and recipes in calendar events and food plans. The 27-inch Cal Max, which was introduced last year, costs up to $ 600 and an additional $ 80 a year for access to all functions.

Hot on Skylight's Heels is an app called Maple that was launched in February 2021.The back office of every family“Maple has gone through some iterations, including one that made it possible for the parents to sell”Prepared plans”For other families, but the app is primarily a family calendar that is operated by to-do lists. You can create tasks, assign you members of the family and then see a schedule for everything 40 dollars a year To synchronize external calendars, get rid of advertisements and access AI functions.

I know what you think: Google and Apple software can do a lot of it for free. And you were right. It is not necessary to pay a dedicated family calendar if you want to start existing software, including what you use for work, to stay organized.

Tech-promised parents have been doing this for years. In 2016, a father went to Semi viral in Sweden because he blogs about it Use Slack to keep an eye on your family And helped inspire the Atlantic history, “The subsequent storage of the American house.Emily Oster, the economist became a parent guru, the concept in The family companyPresent A book on the use of corporate software outside the shelf like Asana to organize your family a few years ago. Just last year, the New York Times spoke to a number of parents, many of whom worked in the risk capital or crypto industry who use project management tools such as Trello and Term Run your families like startups.

“Tasks and tasks, task 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 is simply more convenient to do everything in the place where you lead the family and the house.”

Michael Perry, co -founder and CEO of Maple, also told me that the job of his company is “building a calendar that includes seven days a week of our lives as a working parent”. Maple also invites its users to join a slack community in which they can connect the functions or hate functions such as the new web -app from Maple to start this autumn.

Senior lights and maple are the two family assistants that I used the most, but they are hardly the only ones. Fireplace sells its own huge touchscreen calendar for your kitchen and sold and sold jam Looks like an maple clone with a little z -design flair. Apps like Milo And Ohai Lean into the AI ​​from everything and promise to use chatbots to keep your family organized. There are also technology companies that try to combine parents. honeycomb says it helps the parents to “share the mental and logistical load” about group chats and intelligent calendars and The sandwich club is a AI-driven advisory platform on which other parents can adhere to their questions.

Together, these companies encompass an emerging new industry, which is referred to as an working. There is even an industrial association that is dedicated to promoting its interests, the acceptance of investments and illustration of changes for caregivers such as paid family vacation. “Compare it with the job where FinTech financial services have. We consider the Care Economy as a Famtech as an innovation sector,” said Anna Steffany, Managing Director of Executive Director of Famtech.org“And we consider family technology as all things that deal with the care sector.” A trend report to which Steffany contributed, the nursing economy estimates almost 650 billion US dollars.

It is easy to feel skeptical about a single app or a kitchen touchscreen that promises to facilitate the life of the parents. Heck, I've been using for a few weeks and it is definitely nice not to write my wife an SMS every time the schedule contains a change in the schedule or reminds me of who is on the preschool deposit on that day.

On the other hand, I also wonder if the use of a parents app only means that I record more data about my family in the service of better targeted ads. (The data protection guidelines of both maple And Skylight Say the companies can collect and share personal data to third parties.) I am also aware that a new tool for managing my family means that I have to manage another matter.

“If you try to integrate so many different apps and systems and interfaces in the integration, the real cost-benefit ratio can be dropped,” said Daminger, the UW Madison professor. “Sometimes we try to make things easier, but in the end we only create new forms of work.”

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