Parents are at a breaking point — AI companies see an opportunity.

Published Sun, Aug 23, 2026

The modern parenting throuple

Amanda Hoover

By Amanda Hoover

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2026-08-23T08:07:01.238Z

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Molly and Sean Morse agree that they want their 5-year-old daughter to be ready for the AI future. By night they're tech-free, telling stories with her, building fantasy worlds and characters and letting her imagination roam. Then in the morning, she uses an AI image generator like Midourney to visualize a scene from the previous night's bedtime story.

But when it comes to managing the mental load of parenting, the Austin-based couple have different ideas.

Molly, who runs a startup to help parents book activities for kids, is willing to use AI for logistics, like meal planning or sorting through her email to surface the most important messages from their daughter's school. Sean, who works in tech sales, wants to go further. He has his eyes on Omi necklace, an AI wearable that listens in on your day and includes a feature called Parent Whisperer. It records and analyzes interactions between parent and child, logging things like school assignments and supplies to order. The device also picks up on tone, alerting parents when their kid may be unhappy — registering everything from "from toddler tantrums to teenage mood swings," per its ad copy — and offering "expert-backed guidance" on how to respond.

Molly isn't sold on the surveillance state aspect. "I don't want it to advise me on the moral north of family life," she says.

Sean doesn't see the Omi as different from all the ways he's already tracked across the internet. He also thinks the AI would help when his daughter's sudden shifts in temperament confuse him and Molly and leave them scrambling. He sees it like a football team watching game film to learn from their mistakes. It may help him answer the question that swims through his brain at night, he says: "Did I do a bad thing as a dad today? Did I mess that up?"

AI companies are marketing their products as solutions to overloaded parenthood. Last month, Sam Altman heralded a "cool use case" of ChatGPT that involved connecting family calendars to the app, and then using it to create a podcast that summarizes upcoming events in kids' lives to play in the car. ("Talk to your kids," came the internet backlash.) Meta recently began piloting an AI storytelling app called StoryKit. And of the 6,500 words in Mark Zuckerberg's recent AI utopia manifesto, some of the most frequently cited and critiqued included a passage about using an agent to help him with the very analog, quaint pastime of baking with his 8-year-old daughter.

These are sentiments largely lost on a public that's become distrustful of AI, dismissed as the musings of out-of-touch billionaires who have infinite parenting resources at their disposal. And yet, parents are turning to AI themselves. It's not that they're lazy or bored by the best parts of parenting — the ones that Altman and Zuckerberg suggest supplementing with AI. Many are turning to AI because they care, and because modern parenting often feels like it requires a third parent, human or robotic.

AI will optimize our work, our lives, and our relationships, Big Tech bosses say. But in parenting, when the ROI for an 18-year investment is a happy, educated, well-adjusted adult offspring, the path from infancy to that goal is one of life's least linear journeys.

Parenting hasn't been waiting for AI to come along. "I cannot imagine having gone through figuring out how to raise a newborn without ChatGPT," Altman said last year, before conceding, "Clearly, people did it for a long time."

But the demands of parenting have ballooned in the past half century. As of 2025, dads with kids ages 5 or younger spent an average of 1.7 hours a day caring for children, and moms spent about 2.8 hours, according to the American Time Use Survey. In 1965, moms spent just under an hour, and dads spent an average of 16 minutes.

Some of this evolved as parents took a more active role in their kids' schooling and social lives, and as kids' schedules filled up with more sports teams, extracurriculars, and tutoring in the ever-escalating college admissions gauntlet. Many of the headaches parents face are the result of the very technology meant to streamline family life — emails from schools, patient portals pinging from every doctor's office, an app for scheduling soccer practice, a WhatsApp chat for parents in the neighborhood. Much of this labor has fallen on moms, who do an average of twice the household labor of dads, even in families where both parents have jobs.

Ironically, parents with more time on their hands already are more likely to use AI for parenting.

Both moms and dads are looking to ease these burdens. Men adopted AI quicker than women, but now about half of each gender say they use chatbots, according to the Pew Research Center. Men are more likely to say AI makes them productive, more likely than women to say AI will have positive impacts on themselves and on society, and that they will feel "extremely confident" using chatbots.

Ironically, parents with more time on their hands already are more likely to have explored AI uses for their family, Lan Nguyen Chaplin, a professor teaching integrated marketing communications at Northwestern University, found in her research. While it may seem like busiest parents would be the ones gravitating toward automation, she found that the most overwhelmed parents haven't had time to use AI and trust it enough to incorporate it into parenting.

In general, Nguyen Chaplin says, "parents feel perfectly fine using AI to help them schedule. Where the guilt comes in is replacing themselves, using AI to replace them for emotional support." Still, a small portion of parents use AI for that very support, along with keeping their kids occupied, and as a babysitter, Nguyen Chaplin says. More common uses include homework help, meal planning, and finding activities.

Mostly, men and women felt similarly about how AI should be used in parenting, Nguyen Chaplin's research found. But dads were more likely to say AI can help them be a better parent.

As parents try to divvy up the pie of parenting duties fairly, communicating about who has what slice under control is another task itself that AI companies claim to solve. Jean-Denis Greze, the founder of AI assistant platform Town, says he and his wife try to split parenting responsibilities of their two kids fifty-fifty. But that means some of the info about activities could end up in her inbox, and soccer practice schedules in his. Instead of asking each other for updates constantly, they have AI assistants that can search each other's inboxes to find answers. For example: If Greze was tasked with signing their son up for soccer, his wife might follow up by having her assistant ask his.

"The nice thing when I ask my assistant for something that I know lives somewhere in her inbox is, I don't feel like I'm nagging her," Greze says, noting he doesn't think speaking through AI assistants stifles communication between them.

Apps are targeting this pain point. "Running a household is like running a small business," says Liz Meyerdirk, founder of Babs, a family organization app launching in September, and mother of three kids ages 7, 10, and 12. Meyerdirk has spent her career working in logistics, and says she hasn't found a solution like those that exist for work that translates to the sprawling needs of families. "We are trying to push a product out the door" — the product being a child — "maybe in like 18 years, not every quarter — but we just don't have the same tools"

Michelle Battersby, president of the motherhood social network app Peanut, says her team noticed that many moms would query a chatbot, then bring the findings to Peanut's community, asking if other moms agreed, showing they didn't trust AI alone to answer questions about sleep regression and breastfeeding. Peanut added an AI tool called Ask Peanut that would search the groups for answers "We don't see moms using AI to make parenting more efficient," she says. "We see them coming to AI to help them navigate uncertainty."

The most tech-savvy parents have built their own tools. Sarah Baldeo, a cognitive neuroscientist, spent the past year traveling for work, so she built a custom GPT of herself to chat with her 15-year-old son when she's unavailable. Baldeo tells me she programmed the chatbot with her personality, uploading screenshots of texts between her and her son, along with documents about her values, the family rules, and challenges she felt in parenting.

Baldeo wanted her son to ask the chatbot advice, and he did prompt it with questions he may have fielded to her, like, How do I diplomatically tell my teacher I'm overloaded with assignments? But he also asked the mombot how to convince his human mom to let him hang out at a coffee shop in Chicago in the evening — something Baldeo had been hesitant to allow.

The bot told him, as Baldeo recounts, "Your mom very much values new experiences, being around people from different cultures, different socioeconomic backgrounds, and this is how you should frame it to her: that you're exploring a part of Chicago that is more diverse." Her son took this tact to Baldeo, and she said yes. It was only later that she saw the chat history that let her know he had gamed the bot to manipulate her.

"My instinctual reaction after the fact was, 'oh my gosh, I was manipulated by my own reasoning,'" she says. "I reflected on it and I thought, that's a really clever way to use it, because that's not how I built it."

Parents constantly negotiate the terms for raising kids. They may start a family from a place of shared values, but the world evolves quicker, and kids sit at the frontier of new technologies. There's a push and pull between learning from the past mistakes their own parents may have made, and raising kids in a future where the full effects of AI on society and relationships remains murky. "Of all the areas for AI, I think it is the one where we are the most protective in a way," Greze says. "We care so much about these little humans." Even tech execs, who are all-in on AI and make their fortunes off high screen time, have been reluctant to give their kids free range of social media and personal devices. Restricted access to AI may become the sign of a privileged childhood, where mom and dad had the time to debate how it should be used, and to spend screen-free time with kids.

As I spoke to Sean and Molly, they came to another agreement on AI: It should add to, not supplement, what they already do as parents. "I don't want to replace myself," Sean says. "I view it also as additive," he says of the Omi. "It's not a substitute for what we do in the house every day." That was enough to move the needle for Molly.

So, will they buy an Omi to serve as a parent coach?

Maybe, Molly says. As long as it doesn't take over and tell them how to parent.

Amanda Hoover is a senior correspondent at Business Insider covering the tech industry. She writes about the biggest tech companies and trends.

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Amanda Hoover

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Amanda Hoover is a senior correspondent at Business Insider covering the tech industry. Amanda covers some of the world’s biggest tech companies like Airbnb, Spotify, and Meta and its influential figures. She has written about the evolving workforce, from the ways AI is reshaping roles to how employees are changing their relationship to the job or how they look for work. Her reporting includes deep dives into the tech workforce, looking at the rise of product managers, chief medical officers, and how ageism disproportionately affects tech workers. Amanda also writes about shifting tech trends, and how people are reevaluating how they spend screen time or what apps they use to meet new people. She has written about the influence of social media platforms like Twitter as well as TikTok trends and YouTube creators.Prior to joining Insider, Amanda covered housing tech and the future of work at WIRED. She has also written for The Star-Ledger, The Boston Globe, and Morning Brew.