Lilian Schmidt may not, for the lifetime of her, work out the way to get her daughter to fall asleep.
Not one of the recommendation given to her by sleep consultants or her pediatrician labored—not utilizing a white noise machine, not shopping for blackout curtains, not even giving her a therapeutic massage. “Each single day, it took like two to a few hours to place her to mattress,” the model marketing consultant from Zurich recollects. “She’d scream and combat and we’d all be so exhausted and annoyed by the top of the day.”
When her daughter was 3 and a half years previous, a bleary-eyed and determined Schmidt turned to a controversial parenting instrument: ChatGPT. The recommendation it provided “was utterly reverse from every little thing I’d heard earlier than,” she says. “It stated she wanted extra stimulation,” suggesting that her daughter chew gum or leap on a trampoline earlier than mattress.
To Schmidt’s utter shock, it labored. Inside 5 minutes, her daughter snuggled up subsequent to her and fell asleep. “I used to be freaking out,” she says. “I used to be like, ‘Oh my God, no person was capable of assist me besides ChatGPT.’”
From there, Schmidt, who additionally has a 14-year-old stepson, grew to become one thing of an AI evangelist. In June 2025, she posted a TikTok video with the caption, “I Turned ChatGPT into my coparent,” and it went viral. Her follower rely swelled to 27,000 in simply three weeks. She made her personal customized GPT, Coparent, and began promoting entry to it for $37 on her web site.
Schmidt is considered one of a rising cohort of ladies branding themselves as a brand new sort of momfluencer—not one who makes use of aspirational imagery to make the mundane labor related to motherhood extra aesthetically interesting, however one who asks whether or not the labor is even mandatory in any respect. They publish movies like “The AI Assistant That’s Basically My Mom Brain Now” and “How to Use AI as a Mom,” and promote custom-made prompts or handbooks to mothers who “desire a coparent who by no means forgets the sunscreen or asks you to jot down issues down,” as Schmidt writes in a single TikTok caption.
One one who is comparatively absent from Schmidt’s content material is her longtime associate. In her movies, she’s doing just about the entire parenting labor, together with meal prep, grocery-shopping, and kiddie arts and crafts. That is reflective of actuality; mothers assume the overwhelming majority of the bodily and psychological labor in US households, with a 2022 Division of Labor survey discovering that employed moms spend an additional 13.5 hours per week doing chores and a median of 12.5 hours per week on childcare—a 40 p.c enhance from 1975.
That’s to not say that dads aren’t serving to round the home. Pew knowledge shows that fathers now spend greater than twice as a lot time on family chores and childcare than they did 50 years in the past. However by and enormous, ladies are nonetheless anticipated to shoulder a lot of the family burden.
“It’s not that my associate isn’t serving to, as a result of he’s,” Schmidt says. “However for girls and mothers, there’s a lot invisible labor that you just carry and every little thing is in your fingers, and it truly takes time along with your youngsters away from you.” Mothers flocked to her web page as soon as they noticed she was utilizing AI “to truly be extra current with my youngsters and to be extra emotionally regulated, so I could be a cool mother and a cheerful mother and never a stressed-out one.”
Ladies are much less probably (greater than 20 p.c much less probably, in keeping with one 2025 study) to make use of generative AI of their on a regular basis lives than males are, a discrepancy referred to as the “AI gender hole.” Generative AI instruments endure from what Stephanie Leblanc-Godfrey, a founding father of the corporate Mom AI who refers to herself as a “maternal technologist,” likes to name a “PMS” downside, which means they are typically “pale, male, and off.”
