None of the advice given to her by sleep experts or her pediatrician worked — not using the white noise machine, not buying blackout curtains, not even giving her a massage. “Every day, it took two to three hours to get her to bed,” recalls the Zurich brand consultant. “She would scream and fight and we would all be very tired and dejected by the end of the day.”
When her daughter was three and a half years old, sad and desperate Schmidt turned to a controversial parenting tool: ChatGPT. “It was the complete opposite of the advice I had heard before,” she says. “It said she needed more stimulation,” suggesting that her daughter chew gum or jump on a trampoline before bed.
To Schmidt’s great shock, it worked. Within five minutes, his daughter curled up next to him and fell asleep. “I was panicking,” she says. “I was like, ‘Oh my God, no one except ChatGPT was able to help me.'”
From there, Schmidt, who also has a 14-year-old stepson, became an AI evangelist. In June 2025, she posted a TikTok video with the caption, “I turned Chatgpt into my co-parent,” and it went viral. His number of followers increased to 27,000 in just three weeks. He created his own custom GPT, Coparent, and started selling access to it for $37 on his website.
Schmidt is one of a growing group of women branding themselves as a new kind of momfluencer — not one who uses aspirational imagery to make the mundane labor associated with motherhood seem more aesthetically pleasing, but one who asks whether labor is necessary at all. They post videos like “The AI Assistant That Is Basically My Mom Brain Now” and “How to Use AI as a Mom” and promote customized prompts or handbooks for moms who “want a parent who never forgets sunscreen or asks you to write things down,” as Schmidt writes in a TikTok caption.
One person who is relatively absent from Schmidt’s material is his long-term partner. In her videos, she’s doing all the parenting work, including meal prep, grocery-shopping, and kids’ arts and crafts. It is a reflection of reality; Mothers perform the lion’s share of physical and mental labor in American households, with a 2022 Labor Department survey finding that employed mothers work an additional 13.5 hours per week and spend an average of 12.5 hours per week on child care — a 40 percent increase from 1975.
This does not mean that father are not doing help around the house. Pew data shows that fathers now spend more than twice as much time on household chores and child care as they did 50 years ago. But overall, women are still expected to shoulder most of the household burden.
“It’s not that my partner isn’t helping, it’s that he is,” says Schmidt. “But for women and mothers, there’s a lot of invisible labor that you bear and everything is in your hands, and it really takes time to keep your children away from you.” Moms flocked to her page when they saw she was using AI to “really be more present with my kids and more emotionally in control, so I can be a calm mom and a happy mom, not stressed.”
Women are less likely than men to use generic AI in their everyday lives (more than 20 percent less, according to one study by 2025), a discrepancy known as the “AI gender gap.” Generative AI tools suffer from what Stephanie LeBlanc-Godfrey, founder of Mother AI Company, who refers to herself as a “maternal technologist,” likes to call the “PMS” problem, meaning they tend to be “pale, male, and stale.”
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