Tech Is Coming for Child Care—Could These Tools Make Working Motherhood Easier?

The tech bubble isn’t far. We talked to experts about what to watch.

Here are the apps our editors find most helpful.

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Over 30 years into the explosion of digital and online technologies, child care has stayed mostly a low-tech industry. Even while many parents, especially moms, say the lack of quality child care is driving them from the workforce (and this was true, even pre-pandemic), we’re still searching for sitters, daycares and preschools largely on our own. And for their part, providers themselves are often unable to make themselves known online to people in their community who need their services, when even the cost of tech is prohibitively expensive for many early educators and other child care workers.

The care economy in the US is valued at $648 billion*—yes, billion. But because so much of child care goes unseen and largely unpaid, innovators in the space have not received necessary investments or resources to build and grow workable tech tools for families or for workers.

The COVID-19 pandemic has changed much of that, says Avni Patel Thompson, founder of the invisible load app Milo, and longtime innovator in the child care tech space. “More people—investors, employers, managers—have had to live it and see it, in their teams, in their life, all kinds of stuff. It was an, 'Oh wait, these are actually really painful problems and it's a big market’ moment.”

And since the pandemic began, entrepreneurs and innovators in the child care and family space are seeing an uptick in attention on their sector, said Leslie Forde, founder of Mom’s Hierarchy of Needs. “We’re seeing the increased interest in founders seeking [venture capital] funding,” Forde, who is part of the Family Tech Collaborative group on Slack, said.

But even with that increased interest, entrepreneurs and investors find themselves in new territory when it comes to child care, where many of these innovations are spearheaded by women, who still receive only [2 percent of venture funding] for start-ups—in an industry where consumer spending can only solve a fraction of the problems crippling the child care economy.

“A lot of investors are still not used to investing in child care,” said Blessing Adesiyan, founder of Mother Honestly and the home operating system Villo. “When everything is close to virtual, why should we invest in something physical? But you can’t change a kid’s diaper over Zoom.” And it shouldn’t be daycare providers’ responsibility to make these problems known.

“Child cares are majority run by women and folks of color, and many of them are still pen and paper and hand-drawn ledger affairs,” said Elana Berkowitz, a founding partner of Spring Bank Collective, which invests in tools and services to help working families. “Paid caregivers are some of the hardest working people on earth. We need to be building tools to make it easier to do their job.”

While no single app should be expected to solve the myriad problems US child care faces, there’s no reason technologists shouldn’t be doing more to make it easier for all of us, parents and providers alike, to do our jobs. Here are some of the new tools emerging from this exciting wave of investment in child care innovation, and what they aim to accomplish:

Find Child Care More Easily

It isn’t hard to find out which kindergarten your child is supposed to go to, but it is hard to find a child care center or home-based care provider to watch after your child from ages birth to 5. Winnie, an online marketplace for licensed child care providers, will help parents with that search process in over 8,000 cities currently. Wonderschool is another online marketplace for home-based care centers, which can be even less visible than formal child care centers and preschools, but may be a better fit for parents who work non-traditional hours. Wonderschool is currently working in 31 different states, with more than 2,500 child care providers and programs.

Share the Child Care Load at Home

Other innovators are approaching America’s child care crisis from a more holistic, family-centered perspective by taking pressure off moms who often feel, as Blessing described, the pressure to do everything.

Aforementioned online software Milo, founded by Patel Thompson, assists families in juggling it all. Described as “a combination between a family operating system and an SMS assistant,” it’s still in the beta version and is designed specifically to tackle the invisible load, taking in school schedules, events, emails, kids’ activities, reminders, etc., sorting it all, and sending it where it needs to go. Milo also stores key information that all family members can access, like kids' shoe sizes, playdate parents’ phone numbers, Zoom links, and more.

Parents can also try recently launched Maple, another app that allows for collaboration on tasks and to-do lists, letting multiple users on the same account assign items to family members throughout the day, or on a project basis—say, in organizing an upcoming birthday party or a science fair project—to get things done.

Studies show that outsourcing help for various household tasks is one thing families say makes the work-life hustle easier, especially for working moms. Unfortunately, most of us can’t afford to hire a full-time housekeeper, but Villo by Adesiyan’s Mother Honestly makes life easier for parents by helping them find highly-skilled helpers to assist them at home, one task at a time, while fairly compensating said helpers. Villo saves your preferences, so if hiring someone to fold laundry, clean up or pick up a child from class—all the details are saved so that parents can avoid the hiring, training and explaining that come with the process of outsourcing the tasks. Villo is available in virtual form everywhere and in-person in Houston, with more cities to come in early 2022.

Investment in Early Childhood Innovations

But not all new investments in child care technologies are for-profit. Promise Venture Studio runs a non-profit accelerator for social entrepreneurs to develop and support innovations in early childhood education. Among the collaborations they’ve partnered with is Home Grown, a funders’ collaborative working to increase access to and the quality of home-based child care, a large portion of the child care system that primarily serves families of color and lower-income families. “[Home-based child care] is also slated to grow a lot post-pandemic and is really fragmented, meaning technology can help,” said Matt Glickman, a co-founder and partner at Promise.

Opportunities like that mean that child care “needs every type of investment—and more of it,” Berkowitz said. “No one should have to shoulder the entire burden of this sector, which is utterly strapped.”

The new wave of both public and private investment may allow early child care to receive more attention, and in turn, spur additional investment and innovation in the tools and the people that make our work easier. Only time will tell how much new tech will then boost our economy.

*This number is compiled by the Holding Co. and by Pivotal Ventures, which also supports New America, where Rebecca Gale serves as a Reporting Fellow.