Parents are drowning in school apps

Getty Images; Alyssa Powell/BI Elly Dominicis doesn't consider herself a tiger parent — but the technological jungle of modern-day parenting might turn her into one.

She's inundated by the battery of apps and tools required to handle her sons' schooling and activities.

There's ClassDojo for communication and behavior management, a school portal for the gradebook, homework, and lunch payments, and "good ol' email," Dominicis says.

Then there are the WhatsApp groups: the official ones for each class, the unofficial spinoffs for the soccer team and mom chat , and the spinoff of the spinoff without the one mom nobody likes.

"It takes up a lot of brain space," Dominicis, a 40-year-old mother of a kindergartener and second grader in Miami, says.

Technology has given parents a remarkable amount of visibility into their kids' daily lives.

In some ways, this is a welcome change — no more worrying about lost permission slips or wondering how school really was.

But it's also a lot .

Schools use a sea of apps for grades, announcements, bus schedules, activity signups, and pickup times.

These tools are hard to keep track of and often don't link to each other, meaning parents wind up managing mini workplace software stacks just to tread water.

Dominicis has also started noticing more AI-generated content from teachers , including "overly verbose" emails about relatively minor issues.

"I just respond with AI back, and we're just AI-ing to each other about a missing assignment or something," she says.

She feels like she can't turn off any notifications and, as a result, is constantly a little on edge.

Teachers and districts aren't doing much triage, either.