Is A “Family Assistant” The Key To Doing It All? Some Moms Swear By It

When I was young and kid-free, the promise of a weekend devoid of work was enough to power me through a long work week. But now, my husband and I both work full-time during the week, struggling to balance the daily grind of parenting and corporate life, only to limp through the weekend when we swap corporate work for chores.

Every weekend, we're faced with all the household chores that we simply didn't have time for during the week. Needing to do mountains of laundry, yardwork, grocery shopping, and various cleaning and home maintenance projects wait for us, alongside squeezing in kid extracurriculars and some hope of a social life. There's not much time, if any, for a true break and chance to reset, leaving me constantly drained and exhausted.

Cue eyerolls. Because what I'm describing isn't in any way exclusive to our family. In fact, I'm pretty sure our experience mirrors the experience of most American families.

Yeah, you can do it all — you have to do it all in some regards — but it comes at the expense of your sanity.

But there is a solution I've seen moms start to talk about more and more online that makes it possible to actually do it all. It's a third person to help, someone who can virtually or physically tackle the work it takes to run a household. I've heard them called everything from family assistants to family managers or house managers.

"For me, there was a tipping point of not wanting to spend another Saturday morning doing laundry while trying to parent at the same time," says Catherine Brown, full-time working mom of two and popular content creator The Cabro on Instagram, who realized she was never getting a break.

Heena Aswani, a marketing professional and toddler mom, had a similar breaking point. "Between work, parenting, cooking, and managing the household, I often ended my days completely drained, with little to no energy left for my family," she says. "That's when I decided to start outsourcing the tasks I don't enjoy or that take up too much of my bandwidth."

Both Brown and Aswani are quick to acknowledge that outsourcing work can be cost-prohibitive for some families, but they also point out the tradeoffs they've made to have the extra help and why it's worth it for them.

"I'd rather invest in peace of mind and family time than in more 'stuff'," explains Aswani, who has a house manager come three days a week to cook, tidy, and occasionally do laundry as well as a cleaning service that comes once a month for a full reset. "Yes, affordability can be a concern, but for me, the peace of mind and the joy of a calmer, cleaner environment outweigh the costs."

In a recent Instagram story about how her family can afford to outsource, Brown explains, "We've made choices that reflect privilege. But we've also made tradeoffs: no big vacations, no fancy home upgrades, older cars, budget meals out, and scaled-back memberships. We can't have it all. We've prioritized our mental health over material extras because this is the season we're in."

Brown has a house manager who works 10 hours a week, handling laundry, cooking meals, tidying, and organizing the house. "It's enough to lift the burden of the daily grind out of our week," she says. In addition, Brown uses a virtual family assistant eight hours a month to do things like help plan her daughter's birthday party, schedule doctor appointments, and haggle with customer support over surprise bills.

"For me, outsourcing turned survival into thriving," Aswani stresses. "I'd much rather spend my energy on the things that bring joy and connection than let burnout take over."

I've been drowning for a while now, yet I'm reluctant to outsource any work because of some nagging mom guilt over feeling like I'm supposed to be able to do it all. And yes, I realize that's pretty messed-up logic, bordering on martyr logic, but that's what society has told us we need to do.

There's been a message that, as moms, we should be able to run our house and have high-powered careers and be present and attentive to our children. But time and again, especially over the past couple of years, we've seen that it isn't actually sustainable long-term.

Moms continue to leave the workforce as a result, with a recent study from The University of Kansas finding that the sharpest decline of moms with young children in the workforce in four decades happened this year.

So, a couple of weeks ago, after staring at six loads of laundry to fold and put away on a Saturday morning and a mountain of administrative tasks to tackle behind it, I said f*ck it, and decided to try a virtual family assistant to test whether I'd feel any relief.

I signed up for four hours of help a month through Faye (and no, I didn't get paid to try it and paid the full subscription amount). My assistant has scheduled gutter cleaning, gotten multiple quotes for permanent gutter guards, and picked out curtains for our guest room — all tasks I'm perfectly capable of doing myself, but ones that haven't been completed in the two years I've been talking about them.

She's going to plan my daughter's birthday party, so I won't be scrambling the week before like I usually do. She'll also figure out our holiday cards for this year, which we've missed for the past two years due to competing priorities.

For $169 a month, I'm already feeling like a weight is being lifted off my chest and that maybe, just maybe, I'll be able to get to a place where I feel more on top of things. I'm on the hunt for a house manager to come in a few hours a week to at least tackle laundry, and I've already started looking at our family budget on areas we can scale back, like eating out, to make the cost work.

Is having an assistant the long-term solution for every family to be able to "do it all"? No. That's not possible. The long-term solution is for policies around things like affordable childcare and working practices to change.

Unfortunately, I don't see that happening anytime soon, so it feels like my options are to stay in a constant near-burnout mode all the time, quit my job to be able to properly run the house, or pay to outsource some of the work.

None are fantastic options, tbh. So, for now, I'll try to offload as much as I can figure out how to afford in the hopes that I'll be able to be a more present — and less stressed — mom.