Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Speaker A: Welcome to Pixel Parenting, the podcast that helps families raise kids in a world full of screens using science and curiosity. Here we share science backed strategies and real conversations to help you build healthier digital habits with practical tools for everyday parenting in this digital age. Let's get into it.
Hello fellow parents. Parenting comes with a thousand invisible tasks. As you may already know, the mental load lives in the tiny things the the school emails, the signup, the lunchbox, and all the reminders you're trying to not forget.
Today I'm joined by Amy Briggs, Founder and CEO of Aviva, an AI powered scheduling app built specifically for parents. Amy is also a licensed speech and language pathologist who has spent her career supporting parents and children. Aviva is a scheduling assistant that finds the activities and plans hiding in your emails and then automatically turns them into events on your calendar. But this conversation goes deeper than tools. In this episode we'll talk about the hidden mental load of email, why it pulls so much of a parent's attention, and how to make that load a little later so you can get more of those small moments back with your kids. Let's jump right in.
[00:01:12] Speaker B: Thank you so much for having me, Patricia. I'm really happy to be chatting with you today.
So I am Amy Briggs. I'm the founder and CEO of Aviva, which is an app that is a virtual scheduling assistant for busy parents that does the whole job of scheduling for you so you don't have to. My journey to becoming a tech founder was definitely sort of unexpected. I'm a speech language pathologist by trade, so I've always worked with families and parents and children and been really passionate about helping parents build capacity is really how I think of it. So through that lens, I had worked in public schools for a long time. I had young children of my own, and I really longed to be able to attend their school events and their activities, and the public school calendar didn't allow that. So I transitioned from public school work into private practice right as kind of COVID was winding down. And it was a really unique moment in history for everyone and I'm sure everyone listening.
But what I saw as a clinician was that because everyone was still really home, multiple caregivers were home, and there were a lot of participants in the sessions that I was having with my private, private clients. When I went to treat children, I really saw this very full and real view of what modern parenthood looked like. Kind of peeled behind the curtain and I was so struck over and over again by how many conversations I was having with parents about just a list of ways they felt they were falling short, when in my mind they were incredible parents doing wonderful things for their kids, really moving the needle to make things better, really being intentional about how they were parenting. You know, starting with the fact that they had me there in the first place. Right. Cause they had recognized there was a problem and they were providing support. But so often I was hearing, I'm so sorry, I forgot you were coming, we're double booked. Or like, I'm sorry, I know we're supposed to rotate our toys, but we just don't. And I'm so sorry. My house is a mess. And I'm thinking like, these things are not things you need to apologize for. And it really just started to crystallize in my mind into what I now have come to understand is the mental load of parenthood. So it's all this extra all around every single parent that creates this really unattainable standard of what good parenting looks like and leaves parents feeling constantly behind, like they're falling short, ashamed of what they're doing. When in fact, I think if you look at the statistics of how involved parents are, and this goes across the gender gap too, we're more involved in our parenting than any generation probably has ever been before us. And yet we're lonelier and more disconnected and feeling worse about our parenting than any generation that's come before us. And I thought, I have to do something to change this. You know, what part of this can I tackle? And it was the same moment that AI was becoming available that I was kind of ideating on all of this. And although I've always been pretty skeptical and cautious around technology, I would definitely say I am a late adopter and a skeptical adopter. I realized that AI presented an incredible opportunity where it could actually take some line items off of the table for a whole household where no parent really had to do anything. And it could truly work as an assistant in a way that other tech tools prior to AI or weren't able to fully accomplish. And that's really kind of those two. That idea and the technology that was available got the ball rolling for me. And I. My working hypothesis coming into the idea with no background was I think that AI could really be a meaningful assistant that would be inexpensive enough that the average parent could use it to take meaningful work, a full job off parents plates.
[00:05:18] Speaker A: How do you got to email? It's so specific.
[00:05:20] Speaker B: It is so specific. I thought about other things as I was kind of ideating.
Of course, I thought about childcare that was an obvious one. When I was thinking about the solution, I wanted to make sure that whatever I designed could do something fully, so it wouldn't be a generalist. It would be really specific and do a job to completion to a standard that I would find acceptable in my own household. So I think there were. When I was looking kind of competitively at the market, there were tools that were generalists that did a little bit of scheduling, a little bit of calendar management, a little bit of meal prep, a little bit of, you know, task delegation, but didn't go deep into any of those verticals. I really wanted to completely own a vertical. And one of the things that came up in my conversations with parents, you know, before I was ever building Aviva, and then definitely once I was interviewing people and doing research, was people felt so overwhelmed by the information coming at them in their emails. And I really started to realize I had joined a tech incubator early on to upskill myself and kind of learn, like, what do I need to do to actually get this off the ground? And one of the things that was repeated in that incubator over and over again is like, figure out where the problem is happening. And I kept saying, I think the problem is happening in people's email inboxes. Like, that is, you know, a fire hose. And it's so easy to miss things that are important because there's too much coming in. And even in the items that are important, like a school newsletter, there's too much information in each one to successfully pull out the things that are relevant for you and your kids and your family every single time with 100% accuracy. And then what I found really interesting was when I talked to people about this, there was so much feeling wrapped up in the job that they were doing.
So I heard stories from people with kids all different ages, you know, people who had young kids now, people who had adult children, and the stories were all really the same. They were always around a moment where they missed something in an email, or they never opened it, or they never saw it come. And the consequence of that was they dropped a ball for their kids. And the shame and the guilt around that really became a part of the narrative that those parents felt who they were as a parent.
So kind of those things were signals to me, like, this is a place that's really ripe for innovation. And I was pretty sure, again, with my working hypothesis, that I could get technology to actually do the whole thing so that parents could be relieved of this, like, constant hum of wondering what they might be missing or remembering when they've dropped the ball in the past, or feeling like they couldn't stay on top of things, or you know, something I was really interested in clinically having a phone in between their face and their kids faces during like the small slices of time when everyone was home and could connect.
I really felt like so much of the technology that was present in parents lives was eroding these micro moments of connection that I knew clinically were so important for building the kinds of relationships that made us all want to be parents in the first place.
So I loved the idea of kind of flipping the consumer tech narrative on its head and making a product that instead of inviting users to be using it more and more or engaging their attention for increasing lengths of time, actually was looking for the opposite metrics, like we'll know we're doing well when we don't have high daily active use, but people are subscribing because it's working for them in the background. I wanted something where, you know, your phone could be in a bag and it was doing a job for you so you could just sit and talk to your kids about what everyone dreamed about last night over like the five minutes of breakfast that everyone has before we're all rushing out the door in the morning.
[00:09:18] Speaker A: You mentioned those small special moments in the household that, you know, they're important. As a clinical person, can you, can you develop on that a little bit?
[00:09:27] Speaker B: When I think about, from, you know, my vantage point as a speech language pathologist, having worked with thousands of children, thousands of families over the course of my career, especially public school, you work with so many families at once.
Really, when I, when I pair my experience and what I know from the literature and kind of the clinical research about what actually makes successful parenting, everything stems forward from a deep connection with our kids. So kids need to feel connected to an adult, loved, safe. Obviously their physical safety needs to be met. But once those kind of basic criteria are met in terms of like the parenting moves we can make, there's really no better gift that any parent can give their kids than their undivided attention, even for really short periods of time. And I think this is where sometimes our generation of parents gets this wrong because the messaging is wrong, where it's like, oh, we have to be so involved every second of the day, right? Like pouring ourselves into our kids. But that's really not it. The connection with our kids is built up over time with multiple small, repeated experiences of day to day life where we feel connected. So for example, Rather than like the whole day that you might plan for your child's birthday to make it the most magical experience for them where you have like their favorite activities planned and the big birthday party and all their friends are coming and the perfect gift. Well, that's wonderful. What's actually building the connection with our kids aren't those big events? It's hearing what they have to say and looking at their face while they're talking over breakfast. It's having the bandwidth at the end of the day. I know for many, many children, the time when they're really ready to kind of take the lid off and let parents into what their experience of the day is really like. Is it bedtime when many of us as parents are least resourced, you know, we're all exhausted from the day we've all had. But if that's a time when you can save some bandwidth to actually just be present and listen, hearing what's on our kids minds from their day, what landed on them, what questions they want to ask, that might be five minutes, 10 minutes, it's not a long time and it's not an event per se, but those are really the building blocks to that lasting connection. And that feels feeling of like I have an adult in my life who's tracking with me, who's in this experience together, you know, I don't have to be alone, I don't have to figure everything out myself. I have this support, you know, and I think that we all want to give that to our kids. And I think that the kind of image of what that looks like becomes conflated with these huge events or these huge moves when really it's the quiet little in between moments. It's like when we're getting everyone ready for school in the morning and packing backpacks and our attention is 10 places. It's when we're in between activities or driving our kids in the car. Like those little shifts actually are the most potent.
[00:12:37] Speaker A: You mentioned a bunch of interference and I would add the phone is one of the interferences. Right. Like checking what's next, what's on the calendar, what's tomorrow. All of those things add on to that disconnection.
[00:12:50] Speaker B: Absolutely.
Every time, you know, we're having to pick up our phones. And a lot of the time when parents are picking up their phones, they're ironically doing something for their family. They're checking, is it pajama day? They're checking what the play date happening this week is. They're emailing the teacher about something. They're, you Know, making sure the correct lunch is packed, whatever it might be. But every time we have to shift from one task to another, there's a switching cost.
So getting your kind of executive function wrapped around one discrete activity, which might be listening to your child tell you a story at breakfast, and then you're interrupted with a notification on your phone, and you go to check that the time it takes your mind to get back to the original task is significant and really builds up over the course of the day.
And executive function is a capacity.
It's not limitless. So every time we're switching, we're dipping into that supply that we could be using for so many other meaningful tasks if we had a choice over it. But that was something I really came to think a lot about, too. I felt like so many parents were sort of the victim of their phones and schedules and digital calendars rather than those things being useful tools for them. And I. I just knew that if parents had some choice and autonomy over how they were spending even those little slices of time in between things, that there were much better things that we would all choose to be doing with our time than like checking a calendar or reconciling the calendar with the email for the third or fourth or fifth time in a morning.
[00:14:27] Speaker A: So I want to make sure that parents listening to these don't feel ashamed. We're all doing these. This is just extra information. And you rose awareness on. I didn't know that email was such a deep thing and that there was all these emotional mechanism that would get triggered by not reading an email. And so, yeah, I just want to send a message that we all do this and it's really, really hard to not look at the phone.
[00:14:58] Speaker B: Oh, I'm so glad. I feel like baseline too, for anyone listening.
Absolutely. Do not feel like this is you or that there should be shame associated with this. In my mind, this isn't even a choice. Your choice is miss literally everything happening for your kid, miss every sign up, miss every camp registration, miss everything day. Or you're looking at your email and you're reconciling your email to your calendar, or you're having a tool that supports you, but there's not really a choice to kind of put the phone on the shelf and totally ignore it. Like, there's a reason why we're all looking, right? It's not because we love it or we think that's a good part of parenthood. Like, you will miss everything that's important if you're not looking. So please don't Feel and don't stop looking.
Don't stop looking and don't feel bad about doing it. But like, do welcome in any opportunities you have. If that's something that you're hearing this and you're like, you know what? I actually don't want to spend hours of my day and my week doing that. I think there are a lot of ways that, you know, people can shift that behavior and make hopefully more room and space for the things that do fill your cup and do make you feel good about yourself. Whether that's, you know, just for yourself, whether that's connection with, you know, other adults, whether that's with your kids. I think all of that is so important and it's so hard to come by as a parent when we're all so busy.
[00:16:24] Speaker A: So, Amit, any practical tips to actually, since we're talking about. Yeah, actually checking any practical tips for, you know, day to day. Somebody who's listening needs to do one thing today to start. What would you recommend? Like a good habit?
[00:16:41] Speaker B: Okay, so for starters, and I'm, I'm thinking that most people at this point probably use a digital calendar. I would say having some kind of a digital end place where your information is going is very, very important. So just want to put that out there. If you don't have a digital version of this that makes easiest to share, which takes you out of a default parenting position and allows everyone in the family maybe to participate a little bit more. So that one is really important. I would say one of the quick moves that you can make, and I think I shared this with you, Patricia, when we first spoke, is when you look at your email, I think one of the issues that comes up for a lot of parents is a fear that they will forget something that they see right now and will not be able to take action on it later in the day or later in the week. So, like an email comes in. It's this clinical school newsletter. There may be in my school district, 45 dates in there. Some of them are months away, but some of them are really important, like the graduation date or the spring concert that you need to get in your calendar. One thing you can do if you're a Gmail user is if you look at that email, even whether you've opened it or not, there's a little on the far right hand side, a little clock, and you can actually click that and snooze the email, which means it goes away for now and you can choose a time when you want it to come back up.
So Think to yourself, when is a time when I might have 10 minutes or 15 minutes to like approach these emails that I know are important when I'm not with my kids, when it's not breakfast time, dinner time, bedtime on the weekends, when we're doing a family activity. So like, for me, a lot of the time that's 8 o' clock at night, my kids are in bed, I've got a little time.
It's not a huge commitment. I don't need a lot of like mental brain power to go through that. I'll snooze emails and I'll have them come up for me. Or sometimes I snooze them for a day that's closer to that actual event if there's nothing for me to do.
And then you've alleviated this feeling that you're going to forget if you don't do it right now and you have to go back and check because you might be missing something. So I think that is a great way to leverage free technology that, you know, many people already have kind of in their pocket. And get yourself to a place where you can get your phone just sitting parked somewhere with a little bit more ease. Because that's the other thing. If your phone's parked somewhere but you're still really preoccupied with what you're missing, you're not going to enjoy that moment. You're right. Like your mind is going to be elsewhere. So I think you, you deserve to give yourself some support. Another tip I would give, that's just a simple tip that anyone can do is, is I would do an audit of what's actually on your digital calendar and ask yourself if it's really everything.
I think there are a lot of kind of sneaky things that we all still hold mentally that aren't represented anywhere in a written format. And I think when you're holding things mentally again, your executive function is a capacity. You only have so much of it to use in a day. Do you really want to use your executive function to go pajama day, Pajama day, pajama day, buy strawberries. Pajama day, buy strawberries. Right. Like we all do these things, but I would invite anyone listening to do a quick audit and see what's not on the calendar and start maybe exploring what it might be like to change the criteria of what is calendar worthy. And what I mean by that is like if there's a reminder for yourself that you're giving yourself mentally, why not schedule it as an all day event?
And then at Least you know it's there and you've relieved yourself of having to like hold it in your working memory while you're doing everything else. Or, you know, maybe it's things for yourself that you feel like you're never able to get in time with a friend, a walk, a workout, whatever that might be for you. Go and actually schedule it on your calendar. And even if you don't get to do those things, at least you've identified some blocks of time where they could happen and maybe make it a recurring event. That's another trick that I use all the time. I have a couple things that I do with friends and we are all busy and we are all working and we all have young kids and like, things happen, people get sick, people have to travel for work, whatever it might be, but we schedule it as a recurring event and then we all just like RSVP yes or no if we can come. And at least it's on all our calendars, like holding that space. So that's another thing that I would say is something anyone could do. You could start today and hopefully alleviates like that feeling around having to do this important job.
[00:21:16] Speaker A: We've spoken about your business. Where can people find it? How do they subscribe? What's the. Yeah, where can they offload their email tasks?
[00:21:27] Speaker B: Absolutely. And I don't know if I fully explained what Aviva does, so maybe I should do that too. And then I'll tell you where you can find it. So when you onboard for Aviva, it connects to your Gmail. You set parameters as a user for the kinds of things that you need help scheduling. So whatever activities you might be involved in, maybe it's basketball and swim and theater, maybe you want to know when packages are arriving, maybe you want to be notified about doctor's appointments, whatever it looks like for you and your family, you set those parameters and then Aviva connects with your Gmail, finds anything calendar related that might be an event for you, and automatically turns the chaos in all those emails into calendared events in the app and on your Google Calendar, whether you open the email or not. So if you're missing things a lot, you won't miss them anymore because you have an assistant, essentially that's finding those things for you so you can let go of reading those long digests from school and know that just the important information is pulled out for you. And then it goes a couple steps further. It flags any conflicts for any events that we find. It sets reminders proactively. So if you have a birthday party scheduled a week ahead of time. You'll have an automatic reminder to plan a carpool if needed, to buy a gift, things like that. And really our goal as we continue down our roadmap is to anticipate parents needs.
So to be like that extra adult in the household that knows exactly how everything works, that knows what needs to go into the bag, that has all the information and can help you kind of stay ahead without you having to do that work. And I think by the time this episode comes out, probably our latest big feature release will be launched as well, which is a summary. So the top section of our home screen now is a summary that tells you like I've had a look at your calendar and here's what you have going on today and here's what's coming up. My summary recently I looked at when I was testing it in a development server right before daylight savings time was changing and it told me one of my kids had a sleepover. Your child has a sleepover tonight. Make sure a bag is packed by 5pm and just make note that daylight savings time is happening tomorrow. So the time change is happening and those kinds of reminders that could fall through the cracks for me so easily. So I'm really excited about kind of that overview feature. I think that will be that extra layer of help one more step along that continuum. So where you can find us we are our website is with Aviva.com you can learn more about the app. We are in the App Store and Google Play store so for iPhone and Android Aviva Smart family scheduling and you can follow us on Instagram. We would love to connect with you there. Itaviva and if anyone is interested in chatting more about this, I am always so happy to talk to other parents. You can find me on LinkedIn. AmyBriggs and I would love to connect in any and all of those places. Would love for anyone listening to give the app a try and let us know what you think.
[00:24:34] Speaker A: Well, I encourage everyone to try Aviva to offload all that mental load that can just bring back in return all those moments at home with our little ones and just listening and or focusing our attention in the present.
Thank you so much Amy. This was amazing. I hope the email awareness was raised for our listeners. It was for me definitely. And yeah and I'll put everything on the on the show notes that you mentioned.
[00:25:02] Speaker B: Wonderful. Thank you so much for having me. And again for anyone listening like you're not doing anything wrong, you're doing so much right. Please give yourself credit for all the amazing things you're doing and know that when you feel overwhelmed or you feel like you can't do it all, it's because you're in a system that has too much all for you to do and you need and deserve support. And please give yourself credit.
[00:25:25] Speaker A: Before we wrap up, here's the main if parenting feels overwhelming, it doesn't mean you're doing it wrong. It means you're carrying a lot and you deserve support. Here are a few takeaways from this conversation. The mental load of parenting is real, and missing one email or school detail can trigger way more guilt and shame that it should. Second, the moments kids remember most are often not the big perfect events, but the small everyday moments when you're truly present.
And third, used well, AI can help parents offload background tasks so they can bring more attention and connection back into family life. You can find Amy and Aviva in the show notes, along with ways to try the app and follow their work. And if you're a parent of a child ages 3, 6 to 17, we're also running a short pixel parenting survey about how families are using AI for learning. It's anonymous, takes about seven to 10 minutes, and we would love to hear from you. You'll find that link in the show notes too. If this episode helped, follow the show so you don't miss what's next and share it with a parent who could use a little more support and a little less mental load. Thanks for listening.
