The Decibel - The stress of shared calendars in modern parenting

Episode Date: November 7, 2025

Parents are increasingly relying on elaborate calendar systems to keep track of their families’ activities – from a shared calendar or paper planner to high-end devices that can create a calendar for you by scraping data from your emails. Some parents say it helps them better involve their teen children in scheduling their lives; for others, they feel themselves becoming beholden to their calendars – a draconian digital personal assistant.Zosia Bielski is The Globe’s time use reporter. She joins us to talk about how families are using technology to try to ease the mental load, and what these ever-evolving calendar systems reveal to us about how we value our time.Questions? Comments? Ideas? E-mail us at [e-mail] Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Shared calendars are increasingly a facet of modern family life. But in an age when people are more over-scheduled than ever, they become more and more intricate. So hearth is one in a new generation of calendars that sort of synchronize of all of a family's obligations, all of their calendars, into one sort of hub. It's usually a touchscreen. In this case, it's a large touchscreen that's framed. And it's sort of meant to be hung in a central place in the home. Usually, that ends up being the kitchen. That's Zosha Bielski, the Globe's Time Youth Reporter. And so the idea is that sort of modern family life has gotten so crazy busy

that we sort of can't rely on a paper calendar or notes stuffed down a kid's backpack or notes from school texted to families. And this really sort of speaks to the busyness of modern life, the fact that, you know, you need something this high-tech to sort of. sort of keep your life in check. And by the way, it runs 975 Canadian. Today, Zosha's here to talk about the mental load of keeping everything running smoothly, what families' reliance on these elaborate calendars says about how we value our time,

and whether we should free ourselves from our calendar overlords instead. I'm Cheryl Sutherland, and this is the decibel from the Globe and Mail. Zosha, thanks for joining us today. Thanks for having me on. So, Zosha, we just went through the hearth display, which is one of these calendars or organizational smart tools. It's not the only one that exists. Can you tell me about some of the other ways that people are managing their schedules? Like, what kind of tools are people using?

So families are increasingly using not one, not two, sometimes three, sometimes four modes of schedulers. So you may still have the ratty paper calendar on the fridge. then many families now keep a shared Google Calendar. So that's one Google Calendar across all of their devices where everything is uploaded. You have these newfangled touchscreen displays like Skylight and hearth. There are apps like TeamSnap and Game Changer that pull all of your kids' sports activities, games, practices into one place.

People are using WhatsApp groups to coordinate carpool. And more often than not, families are using one or more of these tools together because like the calendar on the fridge just doesn't cut it anymore. Yeah, yeah, for sure. And so let's like break down who we're talking about here because this is very specific people that are using this type of like many different calendars. So who are we talking about? So in reporting on this story, we wanted to reach out to like as broad an audience as possible,

whether it was empty nesters or retirees or single parents or people without kids. But it became clear that the most insane users of scheduling tools are like parents with two, three kids, athletic kids, and it seems like the adolescent years are really when things ramp up. The people that I found were sort of the most rabid calendar users really kind of fell into that category.

And what they told me was that these calendars sort of give them a visual roadmap, a visual roadmap of the week ahead, this reassurance that they won't miss anything, a visual roadmap that also allows you to sort of avoid conflicts, like time conflicts,

where you might have double-booked yourself, carpool scheduling and even like an ability to mentally prepare for the week like that's how nervous and antsy people are on Sunday night that like looking at that calendar on Sunday night gives them a a visual roadmap and sort of a time to mentally prepare and as one woman put it a false sense of control yeah which I found you know very very candid yeah you know you said something there about like these time conflicts it makes me think about the family becoming kind of like a business like let's circle back let's like make sure oh I can't I can't do this because there's a time conflict here. Like, does that kind of feel a little bit what's happening?

Like, we have this family dynamic that's actually kind of like, I don't know, being at work. It does feel a bit corporate, especially when you look at some of the sleeker tools. It almost feels like your calendar when you're looking sort of at your email, you know, at work. And now we're sort of imposing this on kids. And some of the idea here actually is to offload more of these responsibilities on kids and to give kids a visual sense of their day so that they feel sort of in control or they know what's coming and aren't just sort of asking mom what's on tap for the day. But yeah, you're right. Like the formats themselves do feel quite corporate. Like these are like co-CEOs in the household, you know, with all of their little minions. Great thing you

mentioned here about like, you know, asking mom, because that's kind of what happens here when it comes to scheduling and calendars and commitments. It does fall in a nuclear family a lot of the times to mom, right? And so what are these apps and these calendars trying to solve here? Like, what are they trying to help mom with? That's what I've sort of heard a lot, that essentially, of course, there are exceptions to every rule, but that the schedulers in chief, if you will, have typically been mothers. They're the ones, you know, pulling the note out of the kid's backpack. They're the ones sort of keeping track of what's on for the week. And it's often a thankless task and it's often quite exhausting because you've got to juggle a lot in your brain.

So this is sort of a mental load that women have described for a long time. And for example, the founders of her three women, all of their mothers were MBAs and all of these women were involved in a lot of activities as were their siblings. But all of their mothers, very busy working women, were also juggling all of this inside their head. So part of the push with this particular tool was to offload all of that minutia like swirling around in a mother's brain onto a central piece of technology that's really conspicuous in the home and sort of get it out of mom's brain and get it off of mom's phone. Yeah. And it's really

important that we talk about mental load because it's true. Like there's so much stuff going on. Like I'm a mom of two young girls and there's a lot of stuff going on in your brain and it takes up time. It takes up energy and incapacity, right? So it's invisible work like you said. But I'm curious. Like do these apps, do they actually decrease the mental load? I think for, you know, some people, it really provided that reassurance. And once they could get it on the page or on the screen, it wasn't swirling around in their brain anymore. And they had more room in their brain for other thoughts. And God forbid, you focus on your own career or your own sort of personal time rather than sort of mentally ticking off constantly who's got what. So I think for some women, it certainly did like offload that mental load. For other people, like I said, it helps to sort of mentally prepare for the week, provide some kind of reassurance that nothing. will be missed. But absolutely for others, you know, they would scan the month and realize they had one or two squares free and sort of wonder what the heck are we, like what are we doing to ourselves here. And so for some people, it definitely provoked an anxiety, which then translated

into, you know, lots of parents talking about pushing back on the weekends and taking Saturdays back or Sundays back. And I think for some people, it did involve seeing the big picture and pulling back. Something my mom would probably tell me, like, families have always been busy, right? Like there's always been different appointments and schedules and commitments and organizing all of that and the stresses I come with it. That's not new, right? But tell me what about this moment makes it different? You know, I think something really has happened since the pandemic. We had this sort of reckoning in the pandemic where life halted, the calendars got empty and families had this moment, this opportunity to question how oversubscribed they'd

become and people started going for walks after work or play board games. I mean, life really got small and a lot of those extracurriculars fell away. And of course, the question was, would any of this stick? And, I mean, judging by this piece and judging by the popularity of these scheduling tools, definitely sort of snap back to the status quo and then some, the revenge of the extracurriculars, as one mother put it. There's a real sense of optimization. Like every moment we need to optimize ourselves. That goes for our kids. People talk about over programming. So that's certainly sort of a modern facet of, you know, intensive parenting. And again, there's this idea that, you know, are we really sort of experiencing life together

if all of our time is programmed, right? And programmed into the calendar. And that's sort of the moment that people are grappling with. So I think they're buying the calendar tools to stay afloat in this current moment. But I think there's also like a lot of soul searching and questioning happening because, you know, sometimes the only time people have to talk to their kids is like in the car ride over to X number of activities that everybody feels they have to maintain. Yeah. So it sounds like one of the promises of the shared family calendars is that kids will have more agency and responsibility over their commitments. But is that actually the case just because a kid puts something in a calendar that doesn't mean that the activity itself gets

less stressful. In theory, that's still something for the parent to do. Exactly. It doesn't mean that just because the data entry has been done and it's on the calendar that any of the behavior has changed. Well, you know, I spoke with a couple of mothers who definitely had this goal in mind of sort of instilling more responsibility in their kids for their days and really also wanted to lay bare the work that goes into, you know, handling all the obligations of a family, but it's really this complex operation, this jigsaw puzzle. So I spoke to one mother in Calgary, Millie Adam, who devised a Google calendar for the entire family so that everybody could input their activities and obligations. And once again, she found that she was only the only one

doing the data entry and still reminding everyone. So then she created a joint email account. So everything kind of flows into that one email account and kind of just became really adamant about saying, you know, don't ask me. It's in the calendar and really religiously offloading those asks and those questions because it's going to take time for people to adjust that mom isn't the go-to and sort of rerouting that like, well, check the email, check the calendar. And one thing she said to me was like, you know, if things get missed,

I don't feel like it's my responsibility anymore. It was in the calendar. Did it work for her? I think it's working. She said she feels like much of the responsibility has been lifted off of her. But it also sounds like she made a commitment to herself that if things did get missed or people had trouble adjusting to the system, she just wasn't going to take that on either. Now, another woman I spoke with Margaret Suji, she's got two sons, adolescent sons. And from what I could tell, they seem quite gung-ho about the system.

Her 11-year-old son actually is sort of in charge of the master plan. So he inputs all the meal planning for the dinners and how it dovetails with the after-school activities. And he, you know, manually inputs that onto sort of a paper calendar they have hanging over their kitchen island and seems to take great pride in it. And her older son joined a youth band and, like, promptly inputted all of his practices, concerts, trips into the Google calendar. And these are young sons, so like, kudos to her. It is really mothers pushing back on some of the older ways of doing things. We'll be right back. So, Zosha, these shared calendars seem to give families a sense of control over their time.

And I get it. I think that, you know, having some sort of calendar is helpful and gives us some control in our lives. But I wonder, like, walking by a big digital display every day and seeing all of those commitments out like that, showing us what we have to do every day, that kind of sounds stressful to me. Did you hear from anyone who said it was stressful for them? You know, I think the question definitely came up. Am I running the schedule or is the schedule running me? Or this idea of someone else running my life? You know, when you're run ragged and you've oversubscribed yourself.

and you're not even clear on, like, where did this all come from? And I don't think people thought the calendar was doing that, but it certainly was, like, illuminating that. And so I think the bigger question people are starting to ask themselves is, like, sort of why are we doing this to ourselves, you know? And questioning sort of maybe the false promise of some of these tools that if you just sort of follow the calendar to a T, you will one day get on top of it all. but, of course, is a fallacy because there's always going to be more. And the bigger question is, like, what could fall away and why don't we let it fall away? And sort of why are we scared of a few empty spots and squares on a calendar? Why are we involving our kids in five, six, seven things a week?

You know, what goalposts are we trying to reach? If everyone is miserable and tired, you know, is there something to look at there? is the solution sort of getting it all neatly onto a calendar or, again, questioning the sheer volume of it all, right? And that's sort of the more uncomfortable question. Like, if your time was your own, what would you actually want to do with it, right? Yeah, yeah. I guess if somebody to be said about this need to be busy, like, did you hear from people that may be scared by the thought of an empty calendar space? One author I spoke with talked about parents feeling guilty or antsy when the calendar was empty or when there were empty squares on the calendar,

like what should we be doing with this time? And he sort of sees an adrenaline hit to all this busyness that we get so conditioned to that pace that when things sort of fall away or even if there are some empty squares, we're not really sort of certain what to do with that. And again, the question is what happens when spontaneity, boredom, open moments. sort of completely fall away from a month of squares on that calendar. So I think even people who are hardcore calendar addicts, they're asking themselves these questions. Yeah. It's something I've noticed on the weekends, like, if I don't have anything planned and I'm just

kind of like mosing around at a mall or kind of like, I don't know, just browsing somewhere. And after a certain amount of time, I'm like, oh, should I be doing something else? I get a little bit anxious because it's like if you're spending a long amount of time without a plan, And I don't know, I feel like the calendar has kind of conditioned me to feel like next, next thing now. I've heard it terms sort of the productivity compulsion. Oh, my goodness. Productivity compulsion where, you know, every moment of the day needs to be accounted for. You need to be learning something or bettering yourself or bettering your child with every available moment rather than simply experiencing it.

I think there's real angst there. And then the calendar sort of the hyper calendar obsession sort of, it's a symptom, right? It's a symptom of something deeper. Our calendar overlords. What about memory? Because I feel like, I mean, myself personally, like, if I don't put something in my calendar, I don't remember it anymore. So does this type of, like, putting something in our calendar, does that impact our ability to hold things in our brains? It's an interesting question.

I certainly have felt that. Like, if I don't put it in a manual calendar, a manual agenda, but then also something digital, like, you know, you're out. look calendar, that just flies right out of my brain. And I'm not sure if that's age or just, again, the pace of activities and obligations we're sort of putting on ourselves. So, I mean, that kind of remains to be seen. Will it sort of have impact on these facets of memory? But again, at least the women I talk to were really tired of how much mental bandwidth was being taken up by sort of memorizing all of this minutia for everyone else, right? And then just just holding it in their brain instead of having it on the calendar. Instead of sort of being able to

ruminate on your day or reflect on your experiences or have some sort of deeper thought processes. Instead, it's just this like hamster wheel of who's got what, when. And I'm not sure any of us think that that's sort of a valuable way to, you know, allocate our like brain power. Yeah, for sure. Zosha, before I let you go, I do want to end on what we potentially lose with too much organizing. So something I've noticed for myself is that around the end of May, my spouse and I start filling up the calendar for summer commitments, which are my mostly fun things, but those summer weekends fill up super fast. And then I realize even before summer starts that it's all booked up. And I just wonder, what do we lose by removing the chance

for spontaneity? Like, what about letting your life unfold without a plan? Exactly. And I think that's such a foreign, an increasingly foreign concept for people, like life without a plan. You know, how many times do you talk to a co-worker on a Thursday or Friday? And, you know, what do you got going on this weekend. People will talk about, you know, birthday parties with their kids or sporting events or family stuff. I mean, it'll be four to six things a day. And it's just exhausting hearing it. And I don't know about you, but like if I had my entire summer charted out in May, that would feel like it feels constraining. Now you're locked in, right? And it's sad a bit. Yeah. Even though it's fun. It's sad.

Yeah. And the spontaneity is gone. And I think maybe that's also part of why people ghost because it's sort of just this load of obligations. It's all set out. there. There's no freedom to sort of wiggle out of things or perhaps like you may not just be into it. You may change your mind, but it's all sort of set in stone. So I do think there's a lot to be said for losing spontaneity, losing that sort of open-ended day. And again, we have to ask why is there discomfort around that kind of day or having to sort of account for our time? Or, you know, if you have a little walk or a little shopping spree, you know, feeling like you need to account for that and then sort of return to doing something productive for the rest of

the day to sort of as penance, you know, for veering off the clock. I spoke to one mother, Lisa Diamond, who, you know, works an intensive job, typically gets home at seven, has dinner, time with her children, but then, you know, around 8 p.m., she'll sit back down to her computer at home and resume the last moments at work. And, you know, one day this fall, her son approached her to play soccer at 8 p.m. He just bought. himself some equipment with his own allowance and he just wanted 20 minutes with mum and she actually hesitated because that computer was sort of calling her and she she changed her mind and they played but it was a real eye-opener for her that you know the pull to spend time with

our families in these unscheduled ways you know we have guilt about not doing enough of that as we we sort of keep on the hamster wheel of our obligations but when we do allow ourselves that sort of spontaneous and free time with our family and friends. On the flip side, there's guilt that we're sort of not getting ahead at work or getting ahead of our to-do list. So there's just this constant angst that's sort of elastic between those two points where you're always sort of questioning what it is you're doing with your time and is it the right thing. And so angst has been a really interesting emotion that I've been looking to mine with this beat, you know. Yeah. And so do you have any big takeaways from doing this reporting about, I don't know,

how we can schedule ourselves, but also feel a little bit of, I don't know, freedom. I think, you know, I definitely heard that some scheduling tools are necessary to just sort of survive in this, in this current moment. Flying by the seatier pants might be even more stressful than having some basic tools in hand. And of course, if there are sort of modern tools that can ease some of this burden and take the load off women, I'm all for it. But I also think it's important to sort of look at the big picture of the month ahead of you. And I think this is what families are starting to do, to question, you know, what's too much? What is the point of it all? Is it all crucial? And, you know, if your family's exhausted and you're not

really sitting down and you're just having fleeting moments of conversation running from activity to activity, it may be time to give that calendar like a second look, to be flexible about it and sort of reappraised that spontaneous time, that time that everyone remembers from the pandemic, of course, lots of stress in that period too and angst, but people really do talk wistfully about the unscheduled time of the pandemic, those family walks and like old school pursuits and questioning again, is there any way to go back to a little bit of that? That's a great thought to end on. Zosha, thanks so much for coming the show.

Thank you for having me. That was Zosha Bilski, the Globe's Time Use Reporter. That's it for today. I'm Cheryl Sutherland. Our producers are Madeline White, Mikhail Stein, and Ali Graham. David Crosby edits the show. Adrian Chung is our senior producer,

and Angela Pichenza is our executive editor. Thanks so much for listening, and I'll talk to you soon.