The Couples Who Run Their Families Like A Corporation

Carmen and her husband, Brendan, parents to two elementary-aged children, both work from home — she as an artist and he as a software developer — and meet at noon, in person, every Monday. Yes, there is an agenda: They open their time with Appreciations (“Thanks for doing bedtime so I could go out last night”), Celebrations (“The kids seem to be slightly less cranky in the mornings!”), and Feedback (“I would love it if you’d remember not to soap the cast iron skillet”), and then get down to business.

Priti, 46, says that she and her husband communicate about all home logistics through the project-management tool Trello. Stevie, 37, and her husband, Shawn, use Discord to talk about anything family-related: They have a channel for chores, grocery lists, each child’s medical info, date-night ideas, and even family values (also an intriguing one named #rats). Nedra uses OurFamilyWizard for messaging, shared expenses, updates, and tracking custodial days across two households, while other co-parents told me they are helped by Maia, Splitwise, and Skylight.

I was not asking as a disinterested party. You see, last year my marriage turned 10, and with it came a renewal of vows, just not the love-and-protect kind. These new promises, instead, were primarily focused on logistics. We hired a financial planner, for one. We signed up for a wash-and-fold laundry service. And we committed, after years of some combination of neglect and resistance, to better manage our family. Even though that phrase gives me visions of PowerPoint presentations and leaves me feeling simultaneously repulsed and inadequate, I had to admit the project of our family was in need of some regular power lunches. The alternative, we’d come to realize, was letting the mundane details of raising two children, balancing four schedules, even for a family that was committed to being under-involved, leak into the fun parts of our life.

“I think we tell ourselves that if we just had the right systems, this stuff would be easy. But really, we just need to do less.”

In pursuit of protecting the fun, I asked dozens of parents about their family-business strategies. They told me about Hearth and Skylight for in-home virtual assistance, Paprika and Plan to Eat for meal planning, and Cozi, Tick Tick, and Anylist for making lists. Rebecca, a mother of three kids ages 5 to 11, told me, “We put everything into a Google Calendar. The rule is that if it’s not in the calendar, it doesn’t actually exist.” To get events on the calendar in the first place, several told me that they created a family email address that they use for all family business — from party invites to camp sign-ups to pediatrician appointments. That way no realm is the sole responsibility of one parent.

Erin, a mother of four, just set up her Hearth (billed as the “operating system for the modern family”) and showed it to me over FaceTime. The Hearth, for the uninitiated, is a sleek, large, screen you mount on your wall. (You can choose from three colors that give it the appearance of a jumbo picture frame.) Various Google Calendars are synced to it, and each family member can see their own calendar as well as to do lists and routines. You can also take a picture or screenshot of an invitation, and it will add the information to the calendar. So far, Erin finds that her kids love checking off their tasks and getting little celebrations for sustaining “streaks” for completing routines on a daily basis. It’s not perfect, but she likened it to her use of the Peloton: “If I invest money in something pretty, I’m gonna f*cking use it.”

He schedules a Zoom with me on my Calendly like we are co-workers (aren’t we?).

Inspired, my husband and I opened up our neglected Google Keep, where we found packing lists for vacations we’d taken in 2022. I side-eyed the Fair Play card-deck I’d once brought out with gusto, which promised to “gameify” the process of divvying up household responsibilities, but which had made us so overwhelmed we’d put it away just as quickly. Like the problems we were trying to solve, the solutions felt hard. And I still had some nagging doubts. Was getting better at “managing the family” like a corporation a way to solve for the perils of modern parenting or a way to enable them? As a friend of mine put it, “I think we tell ourselves that if we just had the right systems, this stuff would be easy. But really, we just need to do less.”

Carmen, who has the standing Monday meeting, hasn’t done “the cards” either. But, she told me, “If I get frustrated with something, instead of getting snappy, I just go, ‘I’ll just bring that up on Monday.’” I had to admit that the way Carmen’s weekly meetings improved her life, and her marriage, was deeply attractive. I realized that this was my great fantasy of what structured family management would do for me: relieve me of the many daily micro-aggressions that come with strategizing on the go. What is more joy-killing than your partner announcing a work trip in the middle of taco night, or asking you if you’ve signed up for karate camp (you have not) before you’ve even had your morning coffee?

And with that, my husband and I recommitted to the family business meeting, which we set sporadically, as needs must. He schedules a Zoom with me on my Calendly like we are co-workers (aren’t we?). We sit on our blue velvet couch in the living room, surrounded by the detritus of two children who produce a flabbergasting amount of art, trying to care enough about our tasks to not let them take over the rest of our precious hours together. We finally sent in last year’s taxes (several months late). We have not returned to the cards, I don’t think we really need them anymore. Avoiding all of this had felt like prioritizing connection, but it was really just getting in the way of it. After our last meeting, my husband joked, “That was sexy!” I walked away smiling ’cause I think he was right.

Sarah Wheeler is a writer and educational psychologist whose work has been published in Romper, The Cut, The New York Times, The San Francisco Chronicle, HuffPost, Deadspin, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, and more. Sarah writes about parenting, motherhood, ADHD, disability and neurodiversity, basketball, and many other things. Her newsletter, Momspreading, is a Substack Bestseller.