Welcome to the blackboard jungle

Elly Dominicis doesn’t consider herself a tiger parent — but the technological jungle of modern-day parenting might turn her into one.

She’s inundated by the battery of apps and tools required to handle her sons’ schooling and activities. There’s ClassDojo for communication and behavior management, a school portal for the gradebook, homework, and lunch payments, and “good ol’ email,” Dominicis says. Then there are the WhatsApp groups: the official ones for each class, the unofficial spinoffs for the soccer team and mom chat, and the spinoff of the spinoff without the one mom nobody likes.

“It takes up a lot of brain space,” Dominicis, a 40-year-old mother of a kindergartener and second grader in Miami, says.

Technology has given parents a remarkable amount of visibility into their kids’ daily lives. In some ways, this is a welcome change — no more worrying about lost permission slips or wondering how school really was. But it’s also a lot. Schools use a sea of apps for grades, announcements, bus schedules, activity signups, and pickup times. These tools are hard to keep track of and often don’t link to each other, meaning parents wind up managing mini workplace software stacks just to tread water.

Dominicis has also started noticing more AI-generated content from teachers, including “overly verbose” emails about relatively minor issues. “I just respond with AI back, and we’re just AI-ing to each other about a missing assignment or something,” she says. She feels like she can’t turn off any notifications and, as a result, is constantly a little on edge. Teachers and districts aren’t doing much triage, either.

“A message about a lice outbreak, let’s say, versus a reminder to wear a weird hat for wacky Wednesday — it truly hits my nervous system in the same way,” she says.

The morning we spoke, she thought she’d had a panic attack.

K-12 school districts in the United States have access to an average of 3,000 digital tools, according to the educational technology company Instructure. While many of those apps aren’t parent-facing, the deluge means that every school year parents have to get acquainted with a new wave of tech — and remember last year’s logins.

A constellation of factors explain why these systems remain so fragmented. Teachers have a lot of autonomy over which apps they use, and many simply have different preferences. Edtech companies target individual teachers, hoping that if enough of them start using a tool, the company can then go to the district to sell it in bulk.

A message about a lice outbreak, let’s say, versus a reminder to wear a weird hat for wacky Wednesday — it truly hits my nervous system in the same way.

Some developers intentionally design their apps not to jive with one another. They view interoperability — the ability of apps to share data with one another — as a competitive disadvantage, explains Erin Mote, the CEO and founder of InnovateEDU, a New York-based education nonprofit. “Companies are actively building closed ecosystems to protect things like their user metrics or recurring subscription revenue,” she says.

COVID also contributed to the bloat. “There was a lot of funding and money to go figure out how to do a lot of this online, and districts have held onto that and not done full audits yet of what’s working,” says Melissa Loble, Instructure’s chief academic officer.

This often happens gradually. Emily Dillard, chief information officer at Alexandria City Public Schools in Virginia, says many tools that once had very specific functions have expanded their features and begun to overlap with one another. Suddenly, the district realizes it has three apps that do more or less the same thing. “Then it becomes challenging to figure out which one to keep,” she says.

In this landscape, parent experience can be an afterthought, says Joel Hames, senior vice president of product at ParentSquare, a school-to-home communication and engagement platform. Since they don’t buy the products and aren’t involved in decision-making, providers often overlook their concerns.

For parents, sorting through so much tech can be a frustrating, confusing experience, making it hard to stay plugged into what’s happening with their children.

Jenny LeFlore can’t help but laugh as she tries to map out the various apps and groups she’s in to manage her sons’ — ages 5 and 9 — school and sports activities in Chicago. Homework goes into Remind, unless it goes to Google Classroom. The grades are in Aspen, and the parents’ chat is in GroupMe. The soccer coach uses Kicks for admin and scheduling, and the soccer parents are on WhatsApp. None of it really feels optional. “To be part of a village, you’ve got to be a villager,” she says.

She also wonders about the equity of it all — not everyone has a smartphone, and there’s only so much you can accomplish from the library computer. “If you have a simple phone, where does that land in parenting? How are you checking?” she says.

Parents I spoke to for this story described all sorts of hiccups and headaches.

Kristi Bush, a mom of three in Virginia, wasn’t sure how she missed the memo on gym shirt payments the day we talked. Maybe it was a text message, or an email, or a notification on her phone. As she fired up the payments app to pony up the $7, she was hit with an extra pang of annoyance — a 28-cent credit card processing fee. “Why can’t I send a check in anymore? The fees will kill you,” she says.

The coach of one of Emily Haleck’s sons’ soccer teams in Utah prefers Slack for communications but uses TeamReach for events and games, a situation she considers “mind-boggling.” The same goes for most of the nearly two dozen apps she has to use across her three kids. When the band director at Ryan Goff’s daughter’s Oregon high school announced he’d decided to change apps, he was met with a collective groan from parents. “You can tell that this has been an ongoing problem,” he says.

Dominicis, the Miami mom, finds herself somewhat weirded out by the surveillance of it all. In the first week of school, her kindergartener’s teacher sent her a photo of a slice of pizza with one bite taken out to let her know her son hadn’t eaten it. She appreciated the communication, but it also sent her into a spiral. She doesn’t want her kids to feel like she knows their every move, so she does a bit of acting at the end of the day. “I have to be like, ‘How was your math test today?’ Meanwhile, I know everything,” she says. “I have to pretend that I don’t because I want to have a regular relationship.”

The app overload exposes a familiar imbalance: Someone has to notice all the notifications, and in many households, that person is still Mom.

Haleck’s husband has a demanding job and travels often for work, so they’ve decided it “makes more sense” for her to take the reins, especially since she works part-time. Bush’s husband gets the emails, but she thinks it would be “crazy” for them both to be dealing with all the apps all the time. Goff says he’s always been more of the “wow,” while his wife has been the “how” in their family — she’s in charge of making sure they know what’s expected and getting into the details, he’s the “willing chauffeur.”

Women in opposite-sex couples tend to take on the role of managing their children’s relationship with the wider world, says Allison Daminger, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. They’re often the primary parent who interfaces with schools, doctors, and coaches, including when the cognitive load is evenly shared between partners. Society still expects it — a mother who misses a parent-teacher conference will be judged more harshly than a father — and moms feel guilty if they don’t do it.

“For many of the women that I’ve interviewed, being involved with the kids’ school, the kids’ daycare, extracurriculars, etc., felt like this is a thing that I can uniquely contribute as a mom,” she says.

The intent isn’t to overwhelm parents. Schools are responding to many caregivers’ desire for greater visibility into their children’s education. Kids aren’t the most reliable messengers. Many parents have so much else on their plates that the extra communication is welcome.

One elementary school principal in New York tells me he tries to be conscious of all of the communication going out through ParentSquare, which his district primarily uses, and avoids duplicating teachers’ reminders or calendar notices. Yes, the app is overused, but it’s better than the alternative.

Someone has to notice all the notifications, and in many households, that person is still Mom.

“If I don’t send out a reminder that we have a half-day of school because of parent-teacher conferences, we’ll have 15, 20, 30 kids that come back on the bus because the parents didn’t remember,” he says.

For schools, this is all a delicate, imperfect balance. They don’t want to send out so much information that parents tune out. At the same time, they need to provide a way for parents to tune in.

“They have so many other things happening, and the least that we can do is try to simplify the information that they’re receiving from their school,” Dillard says.

This is a difficult problem to solve. As much as parents would like to have one app for everything, that’s likely not in the cards, since different schools have different budgets, needs, and state requirements. Mote, from InnovateEDU, says school districts could go a long way if they published on their websites, in plain English, all the apps being used, what they do, and who needs them.

The explosion of avenues for parents to be immersed in the minutiae of their children’s schooling and activities also folds into the bigger discussion of how much parenting is too much. “How do we enable kids to develop the skills of how they manage their own lives when we are managing it for them?” Daminger says. The built-in sense of responsibility that comes with growing up is lost if their parents check their grades every day and constantly remind them about the location of football practice. It’s part of a trend toward intensive parenting, especially as the stakes feel higher amid economic uncertainty and technological upheaval.

“There’s a lot of reasons to be nervous as a parent about your kids’ future. And I think these tools end up feeding into that and encouraging parents to really try to control all these things,” Daminger says. “Unfortunately, our kids are separate beings. We ultimately cannot control their lives.”

Instead of getting a cup of coffee during a break at work, Dominicis catches herself perusing the school apps to check out her sons’ latest test scores. She tried to build an AI agent to sort it all, but the best she could do was have Claude scan her emails and add items to her calendar. “I am finding myself spending more time even with that agent set up just making sure it didn’t miss anything,” she says.

She’s ambivalent about what would actually make life easier. “I want to say less information,” she says. “But I know I’ve been trained to have all this information already, so I think I would struggle not having it.”

Emily Stewart is a senior correspondent at Business Insider, writing about business and the economy.