Digital Parenting Tools: From Generative AI to Shared Calendars and Beyond!

Published Oct 17, 2023, 9:00 AM

In today's episode, Sarah and Laura do a round-up of digital tools that might be used to enhance your family management. They cover some interesting uses for generative AI, subscription services, shared calendars + lists, and more!

In the Q&A, a listener writes in asking about when kids' birthday parties tend to transition from family-centered to friend-based -- and is there a way to combine the two?


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Hi. This is Laura Vandercamp. I'm a mother of five, an author, journalist, and speaker. And this is Sarah Hartunger. I'm a mother of three, a practicing physician and blogger. On the side, we are two working parents who love our careers and our families. Welcome to best of both worlds. Here we talk about how real women manage work, family, and time for fun, from figuring out childcare to mapping out long term career goals. We want you to get the most out of life. Welcome to best of both worlds. This is Laura. In this episode we are going to be talking about digital parenting, really tools to make parenting and household management easier with a focus on tech. And so we have covered the concept of tech and parenting before, but more from the question of screen time rules with kids, how to introduce phones and other technolog into our kids' lives. So could do a shout out for episodes number three six to three eight that ran in Believe June? Was it Sarah June?

It was definitely summer and it was notable because I think that was our first themed series that we did.

It may have been and we talked about kids screen time, I interviewed Devora Heidner, who is the author of an awesome new book called Growing Up in Public. When we talked to her, that book was not out yet, but it is now, so you can go pick up a copy and sort of especially if you've got tweens coming into that sort of age where they are building their own digital identities, and these identities can in fact follow them around for the rest of their lives in a way that those of us who grew up pre that age have not had to experience this growing up in Public in fact, so a lot of useful tips from that book encouraging people to check that out. I don't think you'd call yourself in early adopter, would you, Sarah?

I mean I was thinking about this, like yes and no. I think I've become more and more resistant as I've gotten older. When I was young, I actually was a very early adopter because my mom was into computers. I was like the first one with a printer at home, and I'd bring in my like stapled stories and people are like WHOA. I was very fast to know how to type. I would like message on Prodigy and.

Like, say ten you had prodigies.

Yeah, so I was like an early adopter, like in the eighties and nineties, but I've become more and more curmudgeonly in my old age and more and more. I remember when the iPhone came out, I thought it looked cool, but I was like, oh God, oh God, I don't want this. I don't want this. I'm sad about it. And you know what, I still feel like I was kind of right, Like I if I could, like I don't know, go back to that time and let my kids grow up during that time, I wouldn't be sad about it. But I know that's not everybody's feelings, So yes, less of an early adopter going forward, I guess.

Yeah, I don't know. I guess I wouldn't think of myself as an early adopter.

I mean, I.

Remember having a BlackBerry for a while in the sort of two thousand and five two thousand and six era, and then I got a smartphone. I got an iPhone, and I think two thousand and nine. I want to say that some of the first things on it the photos of baby Sam at the time, And yeah, I mean, I don't know. I guess I'm somewhat of a tech skeptic too, because I think in many cases, a lot of these apps solve pseudo problems. I mean things that are not truly problems and maybe are affecting a very small slice of humanity. I mean somebody like, oh, here's an app for like rating and buying baby stuff, and I'm like, well, like, can't any store do that? Like you know, you can ask another human being like what baby stuff did you use? And they can tell you.

I toured such a related conversation in my running group yesterday where one of my friends is a little bit younger. She doesn't have kids yet. She's I'm going to say early thirties, but was like, if you're not on social media, how do you know about anything?

Wow, there's this place to talk other people.

And I listen to up First on NPR, and you guys text me things, and I listen to podcasts and like, somehow I seem to generally know what's going on.

But it's interesting. Yeah, that is kind of funny, which I mean, there are a lot of cool stuff that's tech, and there's a lot of stuff that isn't very helpful. Mean, we talked in a recent episode which will do a shout out for this again in case anyone didn't hear it the first time. One app that has in fact save us a lot of time is the scanning app on your phone, your notes app if you have an iPhone, you can open up you can scan documents. It just like takes a picture of them basically and turns it into a PDF. So, if you have something that you want to keep a copy of and you've like signed and you need to send in so maybe this is like a school medical form or camp form or anything like that, easypasy takes much less time than the old days of you know, having to scan it on a real scanner and put it on some sort of memory stick and send it over or whatever else. So again, even if ninety nine out of one hundred people hearing this knew that the one who didn't has now just benefited their lives tremendously. We got a ton of email about this, by the way, Yes, it was one of the more like of the whole episode. This was brought up again and again, so I get it. Ag. Yeah, yeah, So you know, we'll go through a few examples of things. We asked our Patreon community what tools they enjoyed. We also got the idea to do this episode from a Patreon member who suggested we do a roundup of digital tools that could make parenting and home management easier. So maybe people will get some idea that somebody else is using from this, and if you have others, feel free to send them to us. You can always email me Laura Laura vandercam dot com. I'm happy to share those later. So one of the examples digital family calendar. So the idea being that we all have complex lives where we are trying to coordinate who can take who to what, and maybe there's another after school sitter involved in the driving two, or a nanny or somebody else who needs to know the household schedule, or like a grandparent who's also helping with childcare. So you have multiple people who need to be aware of what other people are doing and what needs to get done. Well, when we have this at work, what do we do? We have a shared calendar where you know where your team members are and what they're working on. You can do this at home as well, so a lot of people use Google Calendar Cozy. There are digital boards like you've looked into this, right, Sarah.

Well, there's Skylight, which shout out prior podcast sponsor way back in the day. I think it was where their photo frames and not their digital calendar, but same company. And then there's a newer one called dacboard dak board, and I got to say dackboard is highly aesthetic. If you go to the worbsite, they're like these beautiful big frames and they take your data out of Google Calendar or whatever and they display it in this very friendly interface. And I can see the benefit if you are a family then enjoys using digital calendars and is used to using digital calendars to begin with, because if not, then you know you're gonna have this really pretty thing that nobody keeps up to date. Yeah.

I mean there's two ways that you do. I mean one is just a shared calendar, right. You can have a shared calendar Google Calendar with any adults who need to see it or older kids as well. There's also the way you can do it so it's a display, right, so that even you know, younger children or people who are just in your house that needed to know it, you know, like an occasional setter that you weren't necessarily incorporating into your Google calendar kind of thing. Would see the schedule as well. Right, that's the two kinds. I guess that's what I'm hearing.

Well, they're seeing it, but the data comes from somebody has to enter it onto calendar. So someone's got to be a digital calendar user, and I guess enough stakeholders probably have to be accurately entering for this information to actually be correct. You get what I'm saying, which I could see being problematic because unlike a whiteboard where somebody might be actively managing it, if you're like kind of not paying attention, you could actually have this beautiful dackboard showing wrong information, which in many ways would be worse than no information.

Yeah, because then people ask like, what are we supposed to do as opposed to assuming that it's this because it didn't get updated since last week for whatever reasonactly, you don't do this though I don't.

But I again, in a family that's actively like if you have two parents, especially who both enjoy using an electronic calendar and are good at keeping them updated and looking at them, I think this could be a really elegant and pretty solution, And then the kids would be able to see everything that's going on, and then as their kids get older, they could be adding to the calendar as well, and you'll see their little play date show up on the dackboard and okay, they could look forward to it.

Yeah, you tell. You could actually even tell them if they could read, but they're having to try. Okay, it's four nights and tell that I get to that, or I don't know. There's probably some way to do, like emojis that could illustrate it even if the child didn't entirely read. We don't do this either. We're pretty old fashioned. I sent around a written list of where everyone needs to go when to my husband, our nanny on you know, usually Thursday, Friday, usually for the next week, and it has to get updated at various points. And I guess I could see that a digital version of this would be more easier updated. But then I feel like people don't necessarily look at that. You know, if you get it like this invite has been updated, do you always look at that. I don't always look at that, so, you know, I feel like, may as well make it its own thing. So and I like to use a paper calendar, but I understand that I am hopelessly old fashioned in that way, and many people. The ship has sailed for that, at least in the work place anyway.

Yeah, but you and I are very busy, and we both do a lot of things, and we both use paper calendars. So I guess I would challenge anyone who's like, it's impossible for me to use paper to like question. I mean, it probably isn't impossible. It's totally fine not to use paper, but I push back on the impossible. And we use a whiteboard, but I do text a picture of the whiteboard to our nanny and my husband at the beginning of every week, So it's kind of digital.

I guess it's digital. Hey, it's using digital tools. You know, texting is very useful. I will say, shout out to texting. I do like that. So AI, generative AI such as chat, GPT our listeners suggested, can use this for meal planning. It turns out that if you type in like give me a recipe with X, Y and Z, or plan out a meal a week of simple meals or five dinners based on sort of minimal ingredients. I mean, that's the kind of thing it actually can do. And you know, you might get usable stuff you might not. This is all in an early stage, but that's when you look at it and say, Okay, recipe on Tuesday looks click crap, but let's do Monday and Wednesday. Those sound good.

Yeah. I could see how it would be more valuable for like idea generating than maybe coming up with the complete plan, although these things are continuing to evolve, and maybe in three years it would be able to spit out a perfect plan where it read my mind and knew exactly what we wanted every night.

I don't know.

I guess maybe if you had specific allergies or food limitations, this could be very useful because essentially it'd be combing the internet for recipes that fit your okay, no gluten and no dairy or something like that, and coming up with specific things that fit that criteria. And that's not necessarily as easy to do by yourself.

Yeah.

I don't personally do this, but I do use Preptish, which is like a human version of this, and I really like it.

Yeah, exactly. Well, Yeah, the AI can come up with lots of stuff that you know, there's different uses of it, so some people have actually used it for personalized bedtime stories. Sarah's not into this idea I can see her rolling her eyes over here. But I have to say, I remember getting a book when I was a kid that was like one of these you know, novelty books you can get where they had a story and they basically put your name in it, like chose the character who kind of looked like you so you could get it, you know, with certain hair color or skin color, eye color whatever, and boy or girl, and have a certain number of siblings in it that you would mention. And you know, so the person sent in like your favorite activities and it spit out this story with you know, fill in the blank with this, and you got a copy of the book, right, And I remember that being kind of an interesting thing. It certainly wasn't a story I re read many times because it was stupid, but it was you know, that was a lot of kids like personalized stuff. Right. It's kind of cool to have things about you because as a kid, you don't necessarily have that. You know, you haven't been able to make your own life. You are survelying on everyone, and so it's fun to be the hero of your own story, which you can be if somebody can create a story, and not all parents At eight pm are at tip top creative idea generate at a time. So you could have AI generate a bedtime story about your four year old who is a girl who likes circus stuff and her poodle and is also into dragons, and it will come up with a story and you can then read that story.

You could. I don't know why it's such a turn off for me. I guess I find the bedtime reading like such an intimate thing. And I also just like I value like actual books, which I know you do as well, of course as an author. I just and this again, this is like one of those like not fair kind of things, like I don't have a great reason, but I'm viscerally like not into it. But hey, if you are, let us know. Maybe it's awesome. And Laura, I think you should try it with Henry tonight.

See what we come up with. Yeah. Yeah, well, I mean I got to say, not all children's literature book is great either, Like you can wind up with some real duds, and it's if the kid really likes it over and over, it's kind of a well I think maybe we could come up with something better. But that idea of generating stuff, not even just stories, but the initial brainstorming is actually a huge thing for the use of AI. So, for instance, you could tell one of the even suggested prompts over at chat GPT is i'd like to experience soul like a local, Right. So, if you were planning a family trip to South Korea and I was like, well, what on earth do I do? Like, if you don't want to go spend hours and hours and hours reading through guide books and lists and all that, they could give you a list and that. Again, I wouldn't base your whole trip based on this, Like you should then take this to a travel agent or a friend who's been to Korea or lives there or whatever and say what do you think of this? But it can get some of that initial brainstorming.

Yeah. I actually did this for Vancouver and we were working with Notion at the time, and I went in and I used it. I was like, give me a list of family fun activities and it was a great place to start from. So I agree, it's so good at like combing the internet for like I don't know, a collection of random facts or stuff that you need. I think that's like where it's strength is. So I agree travel planning can be a great.

Use all Right, we're going to take a quick ad break and then we'll be back with more digital tools for assisting with parenting and household management. So we were talking about tools that can help with parenting household management. I think this listener who suggested we do and of this also said you could use AI to sort through colleges to narrow down the list.

Oh that was a nice idea.

Oh that was your idea. Okay, tell me what you mean by that. Yeah.

I was just thinking, like, there are so many colleges out there, and AI might be a nice way. If you're like I want a urban environment with a really strong music program, I bet it could give you a really decent list of colleges. I mean it may not hit everyone, but again, it's a place to start from. I think anytime you're trying to narrow something that feels really overwhelming, this could be useful. So colleges kind of came to my mind.

Yeah. Now, one thing you should encourage your children not to use AI for is writing their papers. So this is I actually read a fascinating study. I mean it was an informal study, but someone had asked her Harvard professors to grade a couple of essays and it's like one of the essays was AI generated and others were written by human students, and just to see like what grades would this get? And you know, are the grades different? Can they tell the difference? I mean they couldn't. I mean the thing is they got reasonable grades. They didn't get great grades. So if you, you know, want to get a B minus at Harvard, I guess you can use these, but the A students are probably it's not there yet. But of course, you know, things are getting better. So that's going to change the entire way that people are going to even be working with like assigning papers and stuff like that. I think there's going to be a lot more to sort of in class reflection or you know, the tests being in the place as opposed to being out on your own being more written because you know, if you're on any sort of device, I mean, people can come up with ways if they are ethically challenged to use tools that they're not supposed to use. So that's a fascinating thing that's happening.

Yeah, and I can imagine. I mean I'm not an expert in this at all, but the detection when it's AI must be very difficult because I'm like a plagiarism sensor, Like some of it is novel material. It just was written by a robot and not a student, and so like, ugh, what a challenge I feel for those in academia. But yeah, maybe it'll be more like bring back the old blue books.

Yeah, although the thing with that is that because I don't know that people are having quite as much an issue of people using it as a starting point for then other stuff. Right, Like, once you're in the workforce, people might use it to write a rough draft of like a press release, and then you go in and make it better. But it's often very hard to turn nothing into something, whereas turning something into something better with the expertise of knowing what's accurate and what's not and what's a total dud of an idea and what's a good idea, it just gets you started in the same way of that brainstorming. And so you know, using it as a tool, it's probably a different matter. So yeah, interesting stuff. I think about this a lot. As a writer, I can imagine moving on digital payments, you do a lot of sort of well, you do subscriptions and well, no, that's different. Okay, what automatic payments do you do?

I have a number of things on automatic payments, like I don't pay our phone, bo I don't pay or electric I mean I pay all these things. Most of my payments are automatic. To be honest, I don't do a lot of like check writing. And in fact, I even have wine app typically set up to then also be on like a monthly thing, so it also knows that we're going to have a thing, and then when it comes through, it kind of like matches it anyway, So there's there's some automation there for most of them. Does anybody not do with automatic payments of this?

Sure there are people who don't. I don't know. There's probably I mean I pay a lot of bills with checks and do you yeah, some some I do, and I mean, you know, my credit card for stuff, but I actually input it a lot of times. I don't know. It's like wanting to keep track of certain things because I've found and I'm sure you have too, and a lot of our listeners that when you don't, when you have things on repeat, you can wind up using it longer than you really are using it. That you have to if you're gonna do this, you should build in a regular time to audit what you're paying.

Which I do because that's what I do with wineapp every single month as I literally go through every credit card statement and look at every transaction manually and make sure it's all in there. So that awareness comes from that work, which I've gotten pretty fast at, by the way. It's not like hours and hours. But if I didn't do that, yes, I could see that this could be a very slippery slope and you'd have a number of subscriptions you might not even remember existed.

Yeah, yeah, no, I definitely. When I was doing my business, tax has recently found a few things I was like, I'm not sure I'm really using that to the extent of paying for it every month. I think maybe we should cancel that. So I did a few things, and I'm glad that I did. Which is the same problem with subscriptions. Right, So you've got a number of consumer item type things on subscription, correct.

Yes, So we do use Amazon's subscribe and save for a number of things that I put in the household goods category on You need a budget, so everything from like packing tape to laundry to and now we've even added in some like we do our collagen peptides on because it's cheaper, our running gels, certain stationary supplies. But the key is human interaction because every single month, Amazon will send you an email warning that's like you have three days to like update your list or else we're sending you everything on it. And if I miss that is I mean, it's like a disaster. Like we just get boxes and boxes because there's more things than I actually need because you always have the ability to push it forward, but you won't get that subscribe and save price if you take it off your list entirely. So it's quick. But I have a little reminder of like the end of each month, around the twenty sixth of the month, to go in there and be like what do we actually need for the coming month, and then I push forward anything we don't need, and it's it works pretty well. I feel like I've gotten a good rhythm with that.

Yeah, it's funny to think, you know, if something were to happen to us, like what are the things that would sort of go wrong in the gears, in the household and in Sarah's household if something were to happen to her next thing. They know, there's like Allen's of peptide. What are collagens showing up? Yes, exactly, peptides forever, peptides forever. Like what do I do with all this stuff?

Now?

I have multiple problems because you know, yeah, I mean, their incentives are not necessarily to remind you to get it off, so you have to be paying attention to that. But digital tools can remind you of things, so this is always helpful with like calendar reminders for instance.

Correct, yeah, I don't do any of that, but I know a lot of people like to do that. I just have my paper calendar and my reminders that I look at it every day, so I don't need my phone. Also like telling me that I have something. Sometimes it's kind of fun to see that. For example, like I'm doing that marathon nutrition course and by some internet magic, it will show up on my watch Like I didn't make that happen, it just did. But it's also in my planner. But it's like, oh, look, I get reminded every whatever. Right now it says twenty fourteen boys soccer practice or whatever like, but I don't need that because it's also in my planner, but some people love that. Again, you then just have to make sure that everything is in there and that you have them correctly set up, because if you're kind of half there half not, they're dangerous bad.

Yeah, it reminds me that the problems with tech then too. So last year, as in like twenty twenty two to twenty twenty three winter, Ruth was in skating lessons and it was like at New twelve thirty on Saturdays or something, and so Michael put in a recurring calendar reminder for like twelve ten leave on Saturday and put me on it. And now it keeps showing up like every Saturday for I don't know, like did he not delete it. I don't understand, like I can't get off of it. I don't think like he has to take me off of it. And I don't know. I keep getting this thing. I mean, I don't really care, like I don't look at it that much, but it's sort of tech takes on a Yeah, your planner wouldn't do that to you. My planner never tells me what I don't want to. So human interaction with the tool again, that's a theme. You can use these tools you must actively manage these tools. Unfortunately, much of technology these days is not set it and forget it. It's set it and actively manage it. Yeah, exactly set it and actively manage it. We both do use one cool version of AI or whatever it is. The algorithm that Shutterfly and probably other photo sites as well, can make you an album with a reasonable layout. When you put in let's say, thirty photos, you know, from your beach vacation, you say, create an album, and it will do so, and it will choose, you know, things that layouts that look nice, and so if you don't have a particular artistic talent for doing that, or even if you are wonderfully gifted in that area but really don't want to use those skills for creating your you know album of your beach vacation, it makes one that looks great. So we use it all the time. Yes, I do.

I do for our big yearly albums, and I do still manually pull out though it's like three hundred or four hundred. Yeah, you know, there's like a limit. But I wonder if we're gonna eventually get to the point where it could just literally look at my photos on Google Photos and just be like, I know what the good ones are. Here's your twenty twenty three album, and if it was like ninety percent as good as what I would do on my own, I would kind of be okay with that.

So yeah, or even I mean, yeah, you tell it like photos from my beach vacation, right like, and it would be able to figure out like what a normal human would choose from that. Yes, although then there's always the question because you know, whoever is making the album tends to optimize for the photos that they look better in, right. I mean, that's just human nature. I've seen it with other people's albums, Like, that's just it's what you do.

Like, and I'm not in any of the photos, so that's not a problem for us.

Yeah, that's true. If it's photos of your kids at the beach, that's one thing. But if if it's ones that you feature in in any way, you're always just you know, like, oh well my eyes are a little closed in that one. You're not looking at anyone else. So that's good. Now, we don't have Alexas in our home. I know a lot of people like those sort of you know services. But one upside for the people who do use them, and we heard from a lot of people is that it can tell your kids to do things at certain times. So for anyone who has taken on the role of morning drill sergeant to get your children out the door. And if you perhaps do not enjoy doing this, like it's seven twenty four you need to be brushing your teeth or whatever it is that you find yourself saying, you could program Alexa or Family Bell on Google Assist or a couple other different programs to do this for you.

I just wonder whether my kids would listen to that voice, because I feel like they don't even listen to mine until mine has a lot of emotion in it.

Can you get Alexa to yell? Maybe? I don't know.

I have sensed that you are ignoring my initial message.

Does it say things like if you don't finish up in the bathroom now, you are going to miss the bus?

The sort of are like, I will not ship you that toy you ordered.

Oh, Alexa plays dirty exactly by the way, we've just activated everyone's Alexa. Who's about that? We should have called it a code name like Charlotte or something. Yeah, you can tell we don't have them we don't have one. Apologies for that, but yeah, I like this idea of having something else tell the kid. And you did this with a playlist, though, didn't you.

At one point, yes, oh my god, I cannot listen to those songs ever again because it was like the beginning of the Descendant soundtrack and it was like every single day. Oh my god, that is the problem. You got to change it up every once in a while.

You're gonna it's not like, oh, when I hear this song, it's time to brush my teeth, because then you've changed it. So yeah, I like the idea of a playlist, but that has its downsides. Whereas the announcement to that it is time to be brushing your teeth, it is time to be putting on your shoes. It's a little bit harder to get sick of. Perhaps, And by the.

Way, this is not a new idea, Like I just had a flashback to like the mid nineties when my uncle had like an intercom set up with recordings in the house that were like time for bed, not at my house, Like I didn't grow up with that, but I remember being at their house and being like, wow, they do they listen to that no, I.

Don't know, but yeah, I mean if they don't listen to us either, then I'm not sure that the digital assistant could do a worse job. So that is actually something a lot of people suggested, and you might want to look into allowance management. This is an interesting I mean, especially as fewer and fewer people use cash. And while I like cash because I think it's great for teaching kids about money and like making changes, like a little mathlesson every time, and it feels more real when you're handing over dollars as opposed to like swiping a card, like who knows how much money there is on the card, Like it's infinite for all we know, even if it isn't a lot of places don't take cash anymore, and so we've found this out, like when kids went on to a youth group trip or a school trip to a amusement park, and you know what would I do. I would have sent the kid with some amount of cash to spend for the day. And then we realize that they don't take cash, and so you know, most of these places they understand is still a transition, and so they have machines where you can turn dollar bills into a cash card. But you know, I think possibly in the future most places will be like, no, you need a credit or debit card. And of course I'm not like giving my twelve year old like I wasn't you know in the mindset that my twelve year old needs a debit card? Right like that, why would they need that? I can just give them cash? But that increasingly is changing.

So yeah, I'm actually of all these things we're talking about. I think I'm going to check out green Light or similar apps off to see if my husband's on board, because he's actually the one that manages allowance for the most part at our house. But I kind of like the idea of something that allows them to track it easily and just an easy way to have them pay.

So yeah, is there a wine app junior for that sort of thing.

It's a great question. I don't think there's a kid specific program.

Yeah, I mean, it sounds like a cool idea, and I think a lot of people do that. I think some systems money management systems for kids are a little on the price of your side, so you have to again weigh that in is it worth the extra dollars per month to do this versus some other system that you could just use. But I don't know, I haven't really looked into that much because again, we just give them the cash cards. But yeah, we probably need to give the older ones a regular debit card. Actually I think they have one all right, anyway, they don't use it frequently. So, you know, people shared the idea of like trying to create a There are ideas of like documents that people can all use, so you know, if you have things that a babysitter needs to know that could be in a document, though of course you probably want to run through it with the person too the first time, just because if, especially if you have particular things a kid needs, it's better to make sure the person understands.

I'm picturing like a QR code on the fridge that they have to scam with their phone to be like here's the list, Yeah, exactly.

Yeah. The problem is I feel like people don't look at stuff right, Like you scan their phone and it's like, yeah, it's just somewhere in another digital bit of stuff I don't look at. And if it actually mattered, like the kid needs better than at eight o'clock, like probably you need to actually run through that with yess rather than trusting that it was in there. But you can certainly use shared documents for things like holiday lists, gifts for birthdays, vacation planning. People said, my husband and I used a shared one note to put gift ideas, vacation planning notes, and Costco shopping lists. I like that.

I know my kids have already been working on Google slides. They're sharable with what they want for Hanuka.

So that's great. Kids are all over the digital day. We just have to get on board. Yeah. I don't know, we have not done the shared doc thing. I tend to just have it in a notebook somewhere, or we have just not even been making lists for going to Costco and my husband goes and he overbuys like crazy, and I guess that's just the price we play for reducing mental load. So, Sarah, are you going to try any of these?

I like the allowance idea, that's the main one, And then you know, some of them might already do to some extent. We have some shared lists in our house and yeah, but the most appealing one that we've talked about, I may go to general AI more.

You know, as time goes on, especially as it gets better. And yes, I.

Do want to figure out something better for allowances and debit cards and stuff like that, so that those are probably the ones that stick out to me the most.

What about you, Yeah, I just realized that, Yeah, for this Christmas, I probably should just do a Google doc and we can add to that, and maybe it'll look a little bit more rather than like scratching off and like adding and then trying desperately to make sure everyone has the same amount of stuff. That might be a little bit more orderly. But yeah, I don't know if we both remember to add everything to it, so.

Your kids would.

Kids would well, I don't want them to see it though, right, Like, you don't know, but.

If they had requests, if they had their Google doc that they wanted to submit.

So they could just add to it. But then it's like, I don't know. Well, ours is a slide show with links. You can see all the stuff one click to buy, you know, just make it real easy. Yeah, exactly, all right, Well, moving to that question, This is from a listener says, what age did your kids transition from more family oriented birthday parties to inviting their own friends. My oldest will be four at the end of the year and has been talking about a friend birthday party, which I totally understand because I think this seems like a logical age to start. The problem is, I know her grandparents, who live close by, still want and expect to celebrate in some way. Doing two parties seems like a lot to bite off, especially since this is not the only child. It just happens to be the oldest child. Do you have any wisdom about including grandparents but still making it kid centered?

Yeah, so definitely the kids centered part I feel like starts around age three four something like that, where you're inviting their friends. But and this may be partly cultural, grandparents are very common at many birthday parties that I go to, and they're often in some sort of like either just hanging out or like help her kind of a role. There's a lot of really close most generational families in Florida, and so like it is very very commonplace to be like, oh, here's grandma and like, you know, she made the cake or something like that. So I guess like you can certainly combine them and we invite grandparents, like it's usually Josh's parents because they're the ones who live in the same area, but we always invite them even when the party is absolutely kid centric, Like I think at Annabel's party, we had the friends that she wanted at our house doing the activities they wanted, but like, why not have Babe and Poppy hang out and help And then you kind of end up with like a little mini adult party going on. And as the kids get older, they need less and less interactions, so it's actually kind of nice for the adults to have something to do. And if you have close family friends, like you know, at some point it becomes a drop off, but like maybe someone's from a little bit farther away, and if you have close family friends that have friends the kid's age, again, they can kind of join your little adult party. So I don't think it has to be one or the other. Yeah, what about you guys.

It's not two separate parties. You can totally combine this. And I think this is just a mindset in general, like if people like you from different spheres of your life, generally they're going to be fine to gather. And that's something that was not natural to me to think about because I'm not I don't know I'm not like an extroverted person, Like I'm not a natural like pairing people up or introducing people or anything like that. But anyone that you like, whatever sphere of life like, and even if they don't get along, they're going to be like pleasant enough that it's going to be fine. Right, So I would not worry about bringing people together from different spheres of your life just in general. And that translates also to this idea of the kid birthday party. So absolutely let your kid have a kid focused birthday party. Go rent out that bouncy house place because it's for They probably are not dropping the kids off, so you're gonna have a lot of parents there anyway, So they're gonna get to meet your parents. Isn't that exciting? Like now you have people from different parts of your life who know each other, and yeah, you know your parents can help out, but they can also stick around afterwards. Right, So then you know, as you all the families are leaving, they're still there with you. You know the grandparents are there, and then you know they help you pack up, they go back to your house with you. You have a family dinner together because you're gonna have to eat anyway, right, so like, you know, just come back and you know, they can maybe help the kid open the presence, like, you know, provide that ooh in ah, because again this is new parents here. Maybe they know, maybe they don't know. Most kids don't open presents at parties these days. So you're gonna be taking giant clothes baskets full of these presents home and then you can open them at home, and then the parents, the grandparents can provide an appreciative audience, you know, as the children and are opening the presence, And so I think you can find a way to incorporate them as special people and sort of honoring them as well and having them do other things than just the bouncy house party, even though the kid is focused on the bouncy house party. Agree, best of both worlds, best of both worlds and kids friends, parents and kids friends exactly. So love of the week. I guess we're going to go tech focus this week, right? Uh?

Oh, I forget mine, so you go first?

Okay, Well, I like that I can face time with my trainer, So longtime listeners know that I hired a trainer this year to work out with once a week to do strength training as that seems to be the only way I can get myself to do it. And we meet by FaceTime, so I use the weights in my little home gym. I mean, it's basically just like dumbbells and bands and resistance bands and things like that. And I put him on my phone, you know, propped up on the floor, and he's he learned how to do this, I think during COVID when all his regular clients were not meeting in person, and you know, he'd figured out how to coach people via iPad and iPhone and all that. And now I think it's a reasonable chunk of his business because even people who are there, I mean, it's easier to do this if they're in their home gym. And maybe he'll if they're training with him multiple times a week, maybe he'll come once and then another time to buy iPad or something. So anyway, it opens up like because I could never have worked with this person because we don't live anywhere near each other, but because it can be done virtual, we can't. So I think that's kind of an awesome thing.

I think both of ours were on the same vein how digital can combine with human to make something even better than it was before, and so mine was. I'm working with a running coach who has decidedly human, but we use Strava for him to look at my runs, which is digital, and a Google sheet for all my workouts to be planned out and to comment on that. And again it's like it's the mix that makes it really really work, because it would be really tough for everything to be analog, but it's really the human behind it that.

Makes it so great. So yeah, digital plus human, Yeah, Cola, that's the formula for success using digital things as tools to make our human lives better. Well, this has been best of both worlds. We have been talking about digital tools for parenting, household management, the ones we'd like to use, the ones we're not so excited about, but maybe other people are really into. So please let us know your favorites and we will be back next week with more on making work in life together.

Thanks for listening. You can find me Sarah at the shoebox dot com or at the Underscore Shoebox on Instagram, and you.

Can find me Laura at Laura vandercam dot com. This has been the best of both worlds podcasts. Please join us next time for more on making work and life work together.

Best of Both Worlds

Love your career? Love your family? Best of Both Worlds is the show for you! Hosts Laura Vanderkam,  
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