What if we just made parenting...easier?

Imagining collective fixes to summer camp chaos

When I wrote about fancy digital calendars a few weeks ago I noted in passing that there are (at least) two main paths to lighten the mental load that falls most heavily on women’s shoulders.

Path #1: Redistribute the load

No single person in a family should have to carry more than their fair share. For most different-gender couples this would mean taking load off her plate and transferring it to his.

Discussions of mental load tend to focus here: How can we get men to do more?

That’s important, but there’s also…¹

Path #2: Reduce the load altogether

How can we make the work of running a home and raising children less mentally taxing?

Here again, there are a few approaches we could take – let’s call them Sub-path 2A and Sub-path 2B.

Sub-path 2A: Outsource with tech or services

Plenty of entrepreneurial and corporate actors are working to develop an app or program or service an individual family can purchase to tame the chaos.

These tools can be awesome, truly, but they’re limited. There’s the accessibility issue: few families can afford a $700 calendar, a household manger, or even a $20/month subscription.

An even deeper problem is that these tools can only be band-aids for the chaos created by larger systems. Many of the most cognitive labor-heavy tasks, from tax filing to dealing with health insurance to finding (and keeping) childcare, put families at the mercy of bureaucracies that seem optimized to maximize rather than minimize cognitive load. (By contrast, a task like meal planning is something families can handle—or ignore—on their own terms. They get to create their own system, rather than work within the constraints provided by the IRS, or the insurance company, or their child’s school.) That brings me to…

Sub-Path 2B: Invest in collective fixes

These are system upgrades that reduce the load not just for one family, but for lots of families.

Today I’m daydreaming about what some of those system upgrades might look like.² My business-minded spouse would tell me these are unlikely to be monetizable. And my policy-focused friends would tell me there’s no political will for any of this.

Maybe so. (Probably so.) Nevertheless, now more than ever I’m holding tight to positive visions for the future, pie-in-the-sky as they might be. (To quote the inspirational poster on the wall of my 4^th-grade classroom: Aim high! Even if you miss, you’ll land among the stars.)

What follows are two immodest proposals for lightening parents’ mental load.³ I’d love to hear more ideas in the comments!

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Immodest Proposal #1: Pass the Parenthood Paperwork Reduction Act

You know the Paperwork Reduction Act? That 1980 law requiring federal agencies to justify every piece of info they collect from the public? To get approval, agencies need to show that the information they’re requesting is necessary, they have a plan for using it, and they aren’t duplicating info already available elsewhere. Digital.gov explains it this way:

“We want to be good stewards of the public’s time and not overwhelm them with unnecessary or duplicative requests for information.”

Alas, this law only affects federal agencies. Parents are bombarded with requests for information from a whole host of non-government actors, from pediatricians to schools to summer camps (more on this below) to soccer leagues. Is all of this info truly necessary to collect? Could some of it be streamlined?

In my daydreams, the PPRA would create an office responsible for screening requests for parents’ time and mental energy. And it wouldn’t stop at paperwork. Before you could, say, declare every day of camp a different themed dress-up day, you’d have to prove that the net benefits to children outweigh the net costs to parents.⁴ Before you could mandate that everyone in Ms. D’s 3^rd grade class purchase 17 very specific school supplies, you’d have to show how each would be used and why an alternative notebook style wouldn’t be just fine. Before you could require parents to sign up for yet another app, you’d need to explain why none of the existing apps they’re already monitoring could do the job.

Immodest Proposal #2: Create a Common Camp App

As Melinda Wenner Moyer lamented in a recent interview, camp forms are the bane of many parents’ existence. It would be one thing if there was only one to worry about, but many kids end up participating in multiple camps over the summer. It would be one thing if you could just fill them out on your own, but many require a pediatrician’s signoff.

Enter the Common Camp App. Like its college counterpart, which allows students to apply to multiple colleges with one application, the CCA would allow parents to enroll their kid in multiple camps with a single form. Each camp would have the option of creating a custom add-on module tailored to their specific set-up, but they would be prohibited from asking for information already captured in the main form and discouraged from exceeding a certain length.

To make things even easier for parents, they could choose to prepopulate the form with information from the prior year and just update as needed. The interface would also allow them to send the form to their pediatrician for electronic approval with a single click and provide a status update when the doctor’s office signed off.

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Your turn! What would you add to the list? What dreamy, not-quite-practical fixes would make life a little less cognitively taxing for lots of families?

1. Of course, this isn’t an either/or. We should be working on redistributing and reducing load.

2. I was inspired in this exercise by Kathryn Anne Edwards’ vision for a “comprehensive Child Development System” (h/t to Elliot Haspel for alerting me to this). In a recent white paper, Edwards laid out a plan for creating a single, federally funded system that would provide high-quality care for kids during a full workday (none of this ends-at-3pm business), year-round. It’s a genius idea. But because Edwards’ focus is (very reasonably) on accessibility and affordability, she pays limited attention to how such a system would, or could, reduce families’ administrative burden.

3. Here I’m focusing on annoying but (usually) not catastrophic parenting challenges. Low-income families in particular face heavy “administrative burdens”—defined as “any challenge imposed on people that makes it significantly more difficult to access or maintain a benefit for which they would otherwise be eligible”—that come with much higher stakes and deserve sustained policy attention.

4. Kathryn Goldstein has written a lot, some of it hilarious, on the problems with America’s summer camp system!