LVLY co-founder Verity Tuck wants AI to ease the mental load for parents
With parents burning out, the need for innovation in coping with the mental load of family admin has never been more apparent.
Verity Tuck co-founded the same-day flower delivery business LVLY, which she successfully exited 18 months ago. Now, she is launching Goldee, a new AI assistant to help parents manage the mental load of busy family life. Here, Tuck shares more about the AI product that is designed to help shift the weight and make the invisible load visible.
In the midst of hype around AI increasing productivity or stealing jobs , there is one role that many women would be more than happy for it to take on: the mental load of managing a family.
The need for innovation in coping with the mental load of family admin is never more apparent than at the beginning of the school year. The sheer volume of work required to keep our lives in check is utterly overwhelming. It is no wonder parents are burning out.
It is baffling that when it comes to the multitude of apps, emails, WhatsApps and group chats for our home lives, many parents have no help beyond a shared calendar on the fridge.
I even commonly hear that parents just switch off all notifications on WhatsApp and push school emails to a different inbox folder just to try and ease the mental load by not reading it at all.
In my professional life, the prospect of AI to increase our personal productivity, that of our teams, and even our products was intriguing and exciting.
Faced with stark differences between what was available professionally and the lack of options at home, my co-founder and husband, Mike Fraser, and I knew that needed to change.
Technology is creating overwhelm
In my household, Mike and I share the “doing” work of parenting quite evenly, but when it comes to things like Book Week, what’s happening when, and joining all the dots, that’s on me.
Statistics prove I’m not alone. It is disproportionately women who hold 70% of the household mental load and are burning out from the sheer volume of life admin required to manage kids. Almost 50% say there isn’t enough time to get everything done.
In 2021, the AIFS survey asked 2920 people, “who in your household plans and coordinates activities relating to your children?” It found almost no instances of the male taking this on — being the one who usually or always does it — while only 1 in 5 households shared the mental load.
Innovating to solve this, even at least partly, is important. It is why CEOs have personal assistants, and why Annabel Crabb’s The Wife Drought is still relevant 10 years after she wrote it.
Starting and then exiting same-day flower delivery business LVLY, and now launching Goldee, the AI assistant for parents, I can say with conviction that the work of managing a family is akin to running a business.
If we can innovate for even small productivity gains in the workplace, we need to do the same to give back time and headspace to the parents who are simply struggling to keep up with technology that was supposed to help them. Parents need personal assistants, too – and that’s where AI presents exciting opportunities.
How AI can give parents back time
Solutions are thin on the ground. A simple internet search on easing the mental load provides vague help such as “practice self-care” (with what free time?) and “physically writing down everything in your head and delegating” (again, with that free time?!).
As AI becomes mainstream, there is a global focus on governance and risks including gender bias within AI, noting that the technology will hold the same bias as its programmers. The kind of products being developed using AI often reflect the dominance of men in the technology space. I believe it is important that the huge gains to be had using AI are also focused on reducing inequalities.
We don’t claim that the AI we’re developing at Goldee will make the mental load completely vanish (sorry!). But AI tools can and should be created so that any parent can easily take the lead and start forwarding kid-related activities to an AI personal assistant for busy families. This is the kind of innovation that will help shift the weight and make the invisible load visible.
As with productivity tools in the workplace the hidden volume of work, appointments and organisation, and all those tiny to-dos that normally get carried around in the woman’s head will be extracted and put into an action list, ready for anyone to help with.
Importantly, AI created by women to solve our unique problems means we will have tools to stop us from feeling like it’s easier to just keep doing everything ourselves.
That means more time for doing things we enjoy, more time to connect with our partners (rather than fight over who did what), and more time to spend with our kids rather than on your phone trying to find that piece of info. And that’s an AI-driven future all parents can get on board with.
This article was first published by Women’s Agenda.
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