What we see. What we don’t.

What do a business owner, founder, CEO, and entrepreneur likely have in common?

They understand and stay connected to the one (or many) problems their solutions are meant to solve.

Why is this important? Because their ability to impact meaningfully, adapt and survive depends on it.

Which is why, when I started to unpack the modern working parent data, which says:

• More women with children are working than ever before

• Both moms and dads are putting in more hours at work than ever before

• Both parents are spending more time on primary childcare than ever before

• There are more single parents than ever before

• More families have two working parents than ever before

And that because of these changes, the impact is…

• High levels of stress

• Lots of guilt

• Plenty of burnout

• Mothers wanting to stay in the workforce but feeling pushed out

Details here.

I started to ask myself, what’s the root problem here? Or better yet, what are the root problems here?

Being an applied scientist at heart, I tend to observe, ask lots of questions, and try to understand how things really work, or in this case not work.

I’m also a business owner, so I wanted to understand the problem clearly to see if I can build something that provides real value.

And oy! — we have a complex problem on our hands.

It is not one thing…it is so many.

It is… Childcare. Dishes. Meals. Caring for aging parents. Housing. Paid leave. Activity scheduling. School emails. Equity with our partners. The motherhood penalty. The gender wage gap. The mental checklist that never ends.

And it disproportionately impacts women.

It’s the iceberg model, to a tee.

This is a systems problem.

System: a set of things working together as part of an interconnecting network.

It’s a…

• Paid leave problem

• Financial equity problem

• Invisible labor problem

• Childcare policy problem

• Lack of support for women’s health problem

• Workplace equity problem

• Racial disparities problem

• Etc., etc.

What we see: tired, overwhelmed, stressed-out parents.

What’s underneath: lots.

Note: I think in visuals, so creating infographics feels intuitive to me, it’s how I see patterns and make sense of data. They’re not perfect though (because research isn’t either), but they can help tell deeper, often-missed stories.

*Iceberg Model adapted from Donella Meadows and the Systems Thinking Institute.