No need to dread back to school communications - if your school has My Family Hand School Calendar Assistant!
I wanted to share this article with you. With 3 kids within 3 years, I can relate whole heartly to Samantha Selinger-Morris words in the SMH - 'motherhood is a crushing responsibility".
I have felt the resentment, exhaustion and frustration and have had my incidents - a memory of smashing some plates comes to mind. Yikes!
If the home was a business, there would be thousands of tech companies fighting to help us be more productive, to improve our wellbeing. But most of what we do is invisible and with such a lack of mum tech entrepreneurs how the hell can you fix this invisible problem if you have never seen, felt, and lived it?
School and the resumption of extracurricular activities is around the corner, and we are about to be swamped again with a stream of communications from multiple channels that we need to read, filter, manually tap into our phone and bloody remember when we need to.
This is what I have fixed. My startup has developed a calendar-based school app that actually organises and communications for schools and automatically create personalised calendar entries with all the deets you need, when you need it - including the link to the original comms.
Not only does it lighten your mental load, it also helps everyone in the home share responsibility for making family life happen - without you having to spend hours organising everything.
So if this is a pain point for you - I would love to hear from you.
Michelle xx
Parents are busier than ever managing the work, school and family juggle. Our hectic modern lifestyles mean keeping families informed about what’s happening at school – and particularly ensuring they know when something’s required of them – is an ongoing challenge.
On International Women’s Day, we celebrate women's progress towards equality - and recognise how much further there is to go. The first International Women’s Day was held in 1911, at a time when only eight countries allowed women to vote, and equal pay for equal work was unheard of.
While we’ve come a long way, a significant gender pay gap still exists. Australian women earn an average of 22.8% - or around $25,800 per year - less than men. Women’s unpaid work is a large contributor to this inequity – women work an average of 60.5 hours a week, with 48% of this time unpaid, compared with men, who work an average of 58 hours with just 33% of their time unpaid.
Women’s unpaid work is an invisible employment barrier
Women do a disproportionate amount of unpaid work, which includes caring responsibilities and household chores like cooking, shopping and cleaning. They’re also overwhelmingly responsible for staying on top of work, school, extracurricular and life admin communications, events and to-dos.
Working mums spend nearly two hours each week, or 11 business days a year, managing their family schedules and school communications. Responsibility for this manual and time-consuming task means they have less time to participate in paid work and negatively impacts their productivity, career progression and retention.
My Family Hand is excited to partner with WORK180, an international organisation committed to removing the barriers women face in the workplace.
Women’s unpaid work is a significant barrier to achieving pay equality – and the planning and coordination involved in ensuring school, extracurricular activities and family life runs smoothly is a large and invisible component of this burden.
By automatically diarising school communications, My Family Hand's calendar-based school app helps working mothers more easily manage the juggle of work, home and family life. My Family Hand works closely with schools to organise communications so parent's have what they need to be organised, when they need it, reducing their mental load and encouraging shared responsibility.
