Ask any parent and they’ll tell you that the laundry list of daily tasks is relentless. Now, some are turning to a new kind of support system: artificial intelligence.
One mom has recently gone viral on TikTok for “co-parenting” her child with the help of ChatGPT. Lilian Schmidt, a corporate brand strategist based in Zurich, Switzerland, began sharing her AI prompts earlier this year. Since then, she’s built a community of over 21,000 followers who swear by her tips for navigating the highs and lows of parenthood.
Schmidt has a partner, but with both working full-time, she found herself increasingly burnt out by the mental load of parenting their three-year-old. So she turned to ChatGPT.
Whether it’s generating imaginative bedtime stories, creating cleaning schedules, offering advice on sleep regressions, or planning meals based on what’s in the fridge, the AI helped her offload the logistics of parenting—freeing her up to simply be present with her daughter. “I feel like I’m cheating at mom life,” she wrote in one post.
Parental stress, the U.S. Surgeon General warned earlier this year, is a public health crisis. Parents are consistently more likely than other adults to report high levels of stress, so it’s no surprise that many are seeking creative solutions to manage the load.
“ChatGPT literally helped me with breastfeeding, and how to decorate my daughter birthday cake,” one commenter wrote under Schmidt’s video. “Chat gpt is carrying the weight of my family at this point,” another added.
With 2.5 billion prompts made every day in ChatGPT, according to a recent Axios scoop, each day users are coming up with new ways AI can slot into their daily lives, from therapist, to stylist, to co-parent.
But not everyone is on board with AI-assisted parenting. “Is it just me, or is it a problem that women feel relief turning to AI instead of their partners?” one commenter asked. Others raised concerns about the environmental cost of AI, and what that might mean for the next generation.
