Last week, my partner and I performed a familiar ritual of modern co-parenting: I told him that I felt overburdened by mental labor, and we made a plan to adjust. The logistical work of managing our kids’ lives has recently ramped up steeply, and while we’d been sharing the hands-on work equally, a lot of the ramping up had fallen into the category of family managerial work that can get out of whack without anyone meaning to shirk or to let-shirk. The challenge, of course, is that managing and feeling responsible are often invisible. But there’s more to it than that: You could easily miss that you’re not doing a full half of the managing and feeling responsible because even without doing a full half, you are still doing a lot of managing and feeling responsible! There’s just so much to think about, keep track of, and hope to avoid fucking up. It’s a challenge for even two earnest people to tend to it all with enough time left over to just enjoy the adventure of living with and raising kids.
A timely moment, then, for me to stumble upon this article asking “Can A.I. Apps Be a Mom’s Second Brain?” (I think that should be a free link.) It opens like this:
‘One recent evening, Lisa Green’s 5-year-old son, Fitz, came home from school bummed. He couldn’t check out a book from the school library because he hadn’t yet returned his last book.
His mother, a 34-year-old medical resident in pediatrics, said the family…hadn’t realized that books were due on different days each week in accordance with a rotating printed schedule that Fitz had brought home from kindergarten.
As a solution, she located the schedule, took a picture and uploaded it to an artificial intelligence agent named Ollie. Now, Green gets a text message reminding her to pack Fitz’s library book before it is due.
“I was at the point where all the balls I’m starting to drop feel like the glass ones,” Green said, “and that was kind of a breaking point for me.”’
The article goes on to describe how “families have turned to [A.I.] to manage the spiraling administrative tasks that make up much of modern parenthood.”
Some preliminaries: First, the mom framing is annoying. Second, this whole cognitive labor of parenting should probably ideally be treated as a structural problem with a structural solution. For those who won’t read the whole thing, neither of these observations is a critique of the article, which does note that, empirically, it is mostly moms juggling these particular glass balls. (And, as I learned the hard way, authors of pieces like this often don’t get to choose their own titles?) Moreover, the article doesn’t endorse individualized A.I. outsourcing as a solution to the problem of spiraling administrative tasks. So, let’s note that this is probably a structural problem as well as an individual household problem and that it should be a parent problem not a mom problem, and now let’s move on.
Evidently, many parents are turning to A.I. for help. A survey cited in the article found that “2 in 3 parents reported that A.I. reduced their mental load, saving them on average more than 58 minutes a week.” The parents interviewed talk about outsourcing life management to A.I. so they can “be more present” with their kids, and the article’s photographs show the interviewees enjoying the kinds of moments we all wish made up a larger share of parenting time: reading stories or playing games with smiling kids.
I’d like more of those moments, and more presence, myself.
But for several reasons, I won’t be outsourcing managerial work to A.I. agents anytime soon. I find the start-up costs daunting. I’m afraid of A.I. I’m angry about A.I. My partner is (more knowledgeably) afraid of and angry about A.I. We are both disposed toward being fairly comprehensive abstainers. We tend to think that the problems of spiraling mental load are social problems that we all should suffer through together. (But I’d be presenting myself as more virtuous than I am if I let you think this last one weighed decisively for me. I rely on plenty of individualized solutions to social problems rather than suffering in solidarity.)
For me, there’s another reason: I just don’t want robots juggling these balls for us, even if the robots can juggle at least as well as we can, and even if we could spare ourselves time and grief by my handing the juggling over.
These are balls I want us to juggle ourselves.
But…why? This is not like asking the robots to compose emails to friends, to write my papers, to script the conversations I have with my spouse, or to make important parenting decisions. Bracketing existential fear and rage, this is, as household labor-saving technology goes, more like a dishwasher or salad spinner. At best, it saves you time and spares you the mess of manually swinging wet lettuce above your head wrapped in a tea towel. It’s not displacing bedtime stories, sick-kid snuggles, or shooting hoops in the driveway. These parents aren’t outsourcing the core work of loving, caring for, and raising their kids. I think they’re probably giving robots a lot of access to information, and they’re opening themselves up to unforeseen error. But supposing the robot drops no more balls than I do, and bracketing questions of safety and existential threat, the technology seems continuous with other technologies that support parental managerial work—like the hanging kitchen calendar that my family relies on, imperfectly, to keep scheduling balls in the air.
But in one respect, these A.I. apps are not continuous with the hanging calendar: Unlike the calendar, the A.I. is not going to help me juggle; it’s going to juggle for me. I can’t draw that line with precision, but it’s a line I mysteriously find myself caring about. It turns out that these are balls I want to juggle—and drop—myself, even though the juggling isn’t the core work of loving, caring for, and raising the kids.
I have a good friend, a woman in her 70s, whose doctors have repeatedly urged her to start taking GLP-1s. She has several of the serious health conditions that GLP-1s have been found to help treat. But she won’t do it. I can imagine lots of good reasons to refuse GLP-1s, but I’m not persuaded by the reason she gives: “I just want to lose the weight myself.” She thinks it’s better to manage your health conditions through the sheer force of will than through medical intervention. I get it, I even admire it, but I think it’s mistaken. It’s better that the conditions be managed well with technological help than that they be managed less well through sheer force of will. Or anyway, so I’m presently inclined to think.
When I learn of myself that I want to juggle (and drop) the balls myself, I suppose I learn that I have the inverse conviction about family logistics: It’s better that the balls get juggled by me (and my partner) than that they get juggled better but not by me. This could be pure taste—that is, it could be better for me, but only because I prefer it. But I think there’s something my preference is tracking here. I wonder if at the end of the day, I think that managing logistics, in this historical moment, actually is core to the parental role. Maybe that’s why I want it to be me doing it (assisted by technology) rather than technology doing it (assisted by me). (That and the aforementioned fear, rage, and laziness about startup costs.)
I’m not saying I want the logistics for their own sake. I’d rather live in a world where parenting is less managerially taxing. But in a world where parenting is managerially taxing, I suppose I want that to be a part of my experience. I evidently want it to be a part of my experience even if it’s a drag, even if it demands more spousal negotiation, and even if there’s some shattered glass from the dropped balls that the technology could have kept in the air. Of course, I could be wrong to think that management is (contingently) a core part of parenting. But my preferences apparently do suggest that I think that, or something like it.
There’s a different possibility to consider, though: Maybe I’m dissuaded by the startup costs but bitter that those with a higher tolerance for startup costs can avail themselves of this great technology that will free them up for stories, sick-kid snuggles, and shooting hoops. So, in classic sour grapes fashion, I rationalize up a reason, better than my own laziness, to abstain.
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