Meet the startup tackling the invisible work of parenting

Follow enough parents on social media, and you’ll eventually come across a version of this statement: “Check on your friends with kids. They are not OK!”

The fact that it’s often followed by a crying-laughing emoji just highlights the quiet desperation behind it. Parents are stressed the expletive out—so much so that this year the United States Surgeon General released an advisory about parental stress like it has for tobacco, drunk driving, and video game violence.

“It’s time to recognize [the stress and mental health challenges faced by parents] constitute a serious public health concern for our country.” Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy wrote in a New York Times op-ed. “Parents who feel pushed to the brink deserve more than platitudes. They need tangible support.”

Ashley Chang couldn’t agree more. Last year, she launched her company Sundays to connect overwhelmed parents and care providers with human executive assistants. The team of 20 helps with work and family matters, from organizing your inbox to setting up play dates to calling your elderly parents’ insurance company. 

“Our goal is to take off some of that mental and time burden people have and give them a little bit more time back to focus at work and more quality time with their families,” Chang says. 

Sundays does the impossible for more than 120 clients: Organize the chaos and minutiae of work and caregiving, greatly reducing the stress that comes with both. (As a client told Chang via text, “I was moved to tears [from] relief.”)

“One of the hardest things about supporting families is that every family has so much context you have to understand,” Chang explains. “They’re like, ‘I’m so overwhelmed… [but] I don’t know how to get everything out of my brain and into your brain.’”

Dropbox and Dropbox Sign help Sundays make that transfer of knowledge possible. After an in-depth onboarding call, every client gets a Dropbox folder that holds the ins and outs of their lives. School forms and medical records are signed and shared easily; pitch decks, pictures, screenshots, videos, contracts, and documents are organized, secured, and easily searchable.

“Security is one of the most important things for what we do because people are trusting us with their family’s information,” Chang says. “We know what their schedule is, what allergies they have… Taking good care of that information and being good stewards of their trust is really, really important to us.”

By diving into working parents’ lives, Chang has become a thought leader in the space, calling attention to the many structural issues that take women out of the workforce. According to the National Institute of Health, “on average, 24% … exit the labor market in their first year of motherhood.”  

“It can’t be only moms fighting for moms,” she says. 

Chang walks us through how Sundays started from her early conversations with parents, what it’s like to build a business from the ground up, and how tools like Dropbox help her team lighten the mental load for busy families.

We found that a lot of our client’s mental load was because they were only handing things off at the execution phase. We wanted to be at the conceiving level, but with this kind of to-do list version, we weren't there. So now we focus a lot more on building relationships. We always intend to be human-first with a little bit of technology to be more efficient in the background.

How does Sundays use tech to help your families be more efficient?
People told me, “You have this space in the back of your brain where you think about hard work problems. But once I have a kid, all of that brain space is now taken up by things about my kid.”  I think it's really easy for people to not give themselves any space for emotional processing right now. Over time, that all builds up, and you become less effective and less happy. I think having someone take on things for you so that you can be in a better place to manage it is really helpful.

Each executive assistant works really closely with a few families. There's so much information that we need to share between our team and them, we needed a system to store all that data. Dropbox felt like a natural place. We treat that as the home base for all the information that we're sharing between the two of us. 

As we were building up trust with families, they started asking us to do more things, and some of those things were like filling out government forms on their behalf. I have learned while working with families that there are so many forms you have to sign for kids and it's exhausting. So we use Dropbox Sign for that instead of them printing everything out at their house.

If you could describe a future that was heavily affected by Sundays being in the world, what would that look like?
More moms in leadership roles—like if you look at an exec team, there are 50% women and more than 50% of the people are parents. That would be my dream world. 

This interview was edited and condensed for clarity.