Alexa, How Do I Stop This Meltdown?

AI can make our lives more efficient and streamlined, sure, but it can also make parenting easier.

Alexa, How Do I Stop This Meltdown?
Artwork by: Sasha Sviridova

When my now wife and I moved in together in 2019, I was pretty smug about my lesbian lifestyle. We were two women with good incomes, who knew how to handle our business, keep a tidy house, and communicate about everything from our deepest feelings to the tedium of household life.

Five years later, I am not as smug. We have a house and a busy 1-year-old to care for. The work it takes to run our lives has gotten more complicated, and housework is no longer a priority. We’re lucky if we pick up even “the big toys” after the baby is in bed. My wife and I are just two of the more than sixty million parents in the U.S.—gay and straight—juggling the endless to-dos of parenthood, facing never-ending housework, and finding the whole thing stressful. 

Recently my wife asked me if I’d “please find time to call the doctor and book an 18-month check-up for our son.” A few days later, I overheard her on the phone, making our son’s 18-month appointment. Oops.

I’d dropped the ball and I was disappointed in myself. Here’s what I could have done. I could have reached for my phone and said the magic words: “Siri, set reminder to call doctor’s office.” In fact, I could have set up recurring reminders for this kind of thing when the baby was born. 

We live in a time when artificial intelligence promises to simplify our lives, do the thinking for us, even write our emails, resumes, and cover letters. So why couldn’t I do this one simple thing? 

The Gender Gap is Ba-a-ck! 

I am a gender and family researcher for a non-partisan think tank, New America. I study the difficulty of sharing life’s work, all the unpaid labor of housework, child care, cooking, and feeding, that families carry, and its disproportionate burden on women. Solutions for the problem include things like behavioral-science informed nudges and conversation starters to help families become more aware of their patterns. 

Sure there’s a host of apps that exist to help solve the burden, but there’s also a chasm between men and women when it comes to AI use. In one study this year, about half of men in the U.S. reported using generative AI (think: chatbots like ChatGPT and art creators like DavinciAI) over the past 12 months, but only 37% of women. Another study by Deloitte found 43% of British men saying they use generative AI, versus just 28% of women. 

Mothers feel a disproportionate share of the stress, worry, and exhaustion of parenthood, yet they are less likely to use tools that might help them. 

A recent advisory from the Surgeon General, Vivek Murthy, warned of the impact of the stress of parenthood in the United States, specifically around mental load: “The significant mental labor involved with parenting—balancing complex schedules, anticipating a child’s evolving needs, making countless decisions each day on behalf of a child, and monitoring progress,” he wrote, “can limit working memory capacity and negatively impact attentional resources, cognitive functioning, and psychological well-being.” 

Could AI provide a solution to this crisis? The short answer is, Yes, but…

One big reason that women aren’t picking up the technology is because getting started with time-saving solutions requires, well, time. Every time I’ve thought about it, I’ve felt overwhelmed by the options and unsure about where to begin.

There are all-in-one home management apps with AI capabilities, like Maple and Coexist, which allow multiple members of a household or family to share calendars, to-do lists, and menus. There are AI assistants—like Jam and Ohai—which function like an administrative assistant, adding appointments to your calendar or details to your to-do lists (i.e. reminding me not to forget my son’s swim diapers when we go to the park with a splash pad). And there’s Milo, which operates over SMS, saving users the extra step of opening an app: It holds all your family’s logistical data–to-do lists, schedules, school and work information in one central location, and sends users a daily rundown of what they need to take care of.

And then there are chatbots like ChatGPT and Claude, which, if you’re not ready to actually download an app and engage with it, are a good introductory way to begin. 

The Pain of Getting Started

I’ve had many of these apps downloaded, in my phone, for months, with every intention of giving them a go. But clearly I wasn't the only one.

Meredith Burgess is a mental health researcher at the Queensland Centre for Mental Health Research in Brisbane, Australia. Like me, she had the apps, but never set them up.

“I have a lot on my plate. My whole life I’ve been a chronic procrastinator, always running late on things, always forgetting things,” she told me. “A few months ago, I felt like my whole life was falling apart. I couldn't keep on top of anything.”

Ironically, it was her disorganization that finally pushed her to get started with an AI assistant. She had signed up for a free trial for Motion, an AI calendar assistant, in a moment of desperation, then forgotten it entirely. A few months later, she noticed a charge on her credit card for a year-long subscription. 

“I said, ‘Damn, I’ve paid for it. I had better give it a go,’” said Burgess. 

Burgess had just finished her Ph.D. and started a new job, when she picked up Motion, giving her a little more time to think and plan. Still, it took her a week of frequent interactions with Motion to get it set up and working. 

Now, she tells the app her standing appointments and what her goals are for the coming week, like if she wants to go to the gym or prioritize a project at work. The app populates a calendar to help her find a time for it all. She dedicates about half an hour at the start of the week to feed Motion the information it needs to help her. So far, she says it has been a game changer, and she’s not just more organized, she's happier. 

What Can You Do For Me?

But there are simpler ways busy parents can use AI to make their lives easier, too. 

Stephanie LeBlanc-Godfrey, a technology executive, founded Mother AI to help parents navigate the array of new technologies. She got the idea for her service after she opened a chatbot one afternoon and asked it: What can you do for me? Then they talked. 

She asked the chatbot to help her draft a letter of recommendation she had on her to-do list, and little by little gave it all the information she needed the letter to cover; then she tweaked the letter to reflect her voice. 

She saw that the chatbot wasn’t just useful for one-off asks, but also for iterating and expanding on ideas. The more ideas the chatbot gave her for how it could help, the more ideas LeBlanc-Godfrey had for things she could ask of it. 

Now she uses the Google-owned Gemini, which is designed to facilitate creativity, Claude, a privacy-focused AI assistant and OpenAI’s ChatGPT for various tasks.

Here are two ways she’s used chatbots: First, to make packing lists for her kids before family trips. Second, to make a chart, explaining how (and how often) to maintain every appliance in her house.

When her kids ask for help with homework, it’s to the chatbot LeBlanc-Godfrey turns for support: I need to help my third grade child with math homework. They're learning multiplication. Can you provide step-by-step instructions for helping them solve a problem?

“A lot of the media around AI has been almost like, ‘Is AI going to be an apocalyptic event? Is it going to take away all of our jobs?’ We've got all this that can really deter someone from ever wanting to touch or engage with this technology. But we all have an opportunity right now to play with AI,” she told me. 

Time to Play

Play, of course, is an activity women have less time for than men. But after speaking with LeBlanc-Godfrey, I found myself feeling more excited about those possibilities, too. Unlike the life management apps, chatbots are open-ended. You might find ways to use these technologies to answer questions or solve problems that nobody else has thought of yet. Even if you’re tackling the hard work of parenting, there’s an element of discovery, even fun, to the interaction. It’s just you and an encouraging robot working through a problem together. 

One day, tired after a long day of work, I sat at my computer with a chatbot open. I had a few minutes of quiet left before I had to shift back into mom mode. I found myself typing a big, unwieldy question about how to handle the stress and unknowns of the moment, particularly as a queer parent after the presidential election. 

The bot told me it hadn’t been updated since April and couldn’t comment on “current events.”

“Well then,” I wrote, “at least tell me how to get my toddler to eat dinner tonight.” The saltiness in my prompt didn’t register with the bot: It validated me. “Feeding a toddler can be very difficult, and at times, frustrating,” it said. In a few seconds, it was giving me bullet-pointed ideas for how I could make eating more fun and less daunting for all three of us. It asked me about the particular pain points, and what foods my kid prefers. It listed new recipes I could try. We could discuss strategies for introducing these new foods, the chatbot suggested, before I’d even considered that strategies might be necessary.

Many of the ideas were new to me—cut the food into fun shapes; try a picnic in the living room—but none were rocket science, either. They were regular ideas, written by regular humans, which the chatbot had found in articles and posts on the internet. But here they were, compiled in one place, broken down into easy steps, by a chatbot that was both encouraging and fully attentive. 

That night, I tried out a few of them. My son didn’t eat much more than he normally does—maybe an extra nibble or two—but the usual sting of worry, that he wasn’t getting enough or we were doing something wrong, was gone. This dinner was playful. I felt less alone with my worries.

And maybe that’s the message parents need to hear about how AI can make our lives easier. Not that a new app will help us organize and optimize our lives—the pressure to do that is part of what’s so stressful about modern parenting in the first place—but that you don’t have to do all that thinking alone. 

AI can be a thinking partner—like the experienced mom-friend you call when your baby gets sick for the first time. But this partner is always available, and you don’t have to worry about overtaxing or offending it if you decide not to take its advice.

And if you don’t want to talk about the news, that’s fine, too. Your chatbot might not want to either.

Haley Swenson is a research and reporting fellow for Better Life Lab, the intersectional gender equality and work program at the non-partisan think tank New America. She manages BLLx, a research-based tool for sharing the load at home, and is co-founder of Work Life Everything, a company researching the mental load. 💛 Sasha Sviridova is a Switzerland-based illustrator inspired by exploring human relationships and the beauty of nature. Her work combines playful humor, vibrant colors, and unique character designs.

Thank You, Cecile
The activist and former president of Planned Parenthood died on Monday, aged 67.
A Handful of Reasons to Be Hopeful
Maybe the world isn’t as bleak as it seems?
Deciding Which Way to Look
Two men will be honored on Monday. They couldn’t be more different.