Kiki: An app to reduce parental stress by helping them manage their kids school and social life in a single place for all the family

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There is a significant administrative burden of dealing with school/nursery communications which are frequent and often short notice requiring daily check-ins. Our user research indicates this is a widespread problem; parents find it both time consuming and stressful as they don't want their child(ren) to miss out. Examples that have been given by parents are turning up in uniform on a non-uniform day creating great embarrassment for the child, missing a trip form so their child is unable to go, forgetting their swim kit so the child can't participate in swimming lessons, and more. Schools/nurseries use multiple forms of communication such as emails, PDF newsletters, texts, websites and apps. This requires (mostly) mums to have additional mental load and act as an unpaid administrator to combine and share these events with other family members, resolving conflicts as they occur. This workload then multiplies if they have kids at multiple schools creating significant administrative and mental burdens. Then if you also consider neurodivergent parents, managing this administrative burden becomes even more difficult and stressful. We undertook a survey of c.65 mums who are actively trying to "bridge the gap" with their partner, yet only 7% reported that their partner helped with managing school communications compared to 30% doing cooking and/or housework daily \[[EIGE's Gender Equality Index][0]\]. Over 25% of these mums reported that they found it overwhelming with just 15% reporting they found school communications a breeze to deal with. Additionally \>90% of parents admitted they have forgotten a school event, leading to a child missing out alongside parental stress and guilt. It can therefore be inferred that these school communications are having a direct negative impact on parental wellbeing. We aim to reduce this. Our proposed app, _Kiki_, will use AI to alleviate this administrative burden giving parents a way to automatically collate all school/nursery communications into a single shared space with the things most relevant to them highlighted and added to a family calendar.[0]: https://eige.europa.eu/publications-resources/toolkits-guides/gender-equality-index-2021-report/gender-differences-household-chores