Center’d Helps Parents with Time-Saving Tools
In recognition of the increasingly hectic schedules parents face, Center’d - the planning site that ties together local search, community and planning tools in one place - today announced that it has launched a new set of innovative group planning features that will help busy parents.
Time-Crunched Parents and Children
A new study commissioned by Center’d and conducted by Harris Interactive® underscores just how pressed for time parents are, and reveals how many scheduled activities their children participate in today. When asked how the number of extracurricular activities their children participate in compared to the number they did as children, only 13 percent of parents of children under 18 who will participate in activities outside of school claimed their children had less activities, and nearly one out of two (49 percent) respondents stated their children have more or significantly more scheduled activities than they did. In fact, parents of children under 18 spend an average of nearly a quarter (23 percent) of their free time outside of work scheduling and coordinating their children’s and family’s schedules.
According to the survey, nearly one third (30%) of children under 18 who attend school will have more than 3 scheduled extracurricular activities per week this coming school year. Even young children are starting to get booked up, with nearly 8 of every 10 parents (79%) with children under the age of 6 who attend school reporting their children will participate in extracurricular activities.
“As a working mother of two school-aged children and a former teacher, I know first-hand how difficult it is to successfully manage peak planning times, especially the back-to-school season,” said Jennifer Dulski, co-founder and chief executive officer of Center’d. “Our goal at Center’d is to extend a planning ‘lifeline’ to parents so that they feel less overwhelmed and more empowered to effectively organize and manage all of their activities, be they family or professional, big or small.”
To reduce the stress of back-to-school planning and address the needs of today’s time-crunched parents, people can use Center’d to easily organize both family-centric activities (e.g., carpooling, family trips) as well as larger functions that require volunteer coordination, like school events or team practices. In addition to the search, planning and social networking tools already available from Center’d, new features include:
* Volunteer Sign-Up Lists: Center’d enables individuals, schools or organizations to easily recruit and manage the people they need to get stuff done, even for complex recurring tasks. After setting up a sign-up list and associated tasks, Center’d automatically sends participants reminders, and organizers relevant alerts.
* Shared Calendaring: This new feature gives people a quick snap-shot of all their events and tasks from friends and organizations in one place. People can choose which calendars they want to view, and share their calendar with important people like family members. The new sign-up list tool integrates the shared calendar feature so people can easily track their tasks.
* Social Search Enhancements: Back-to-school is also a time when parents exchange recommendations, from which healthcare professionals they like, to information on after-school activities. Now, in addition to using ratings from across the Web, search results will also be weighted according to the places that people’s friends have saved or tagged, providing a more relevant and personalized local search experience.
“Every day I hear from moms confirming that they feel overwhelmed with the amount of activities they have to organize during the school year,” said Amy Keroes, founder of mommytrackd.com and multi-tasking expert. “Not only do they have to stay on top of their own family’s activities, but many of them are also required to volunteer at their school and help plan events for their kids’ groups. It’s great that companies like Center’d are coming to the rescue and helping busy parents plan and organize complex group events that require a lot of time and volunteer coordination.”
Attitudes on Planning School Events
In addition to uncovering information about the time involved planning children’s activities, the survey revealed some interesting data regarding parent’s attitudes toward volunteering to plan school events:
* Over half of parents whose children under 18 attend school (57 percent) said they would be willing to plan school activities or events if it wasn’t so stressful (21 percent); if it was easier to recruit volunteers to help (19 percent), or if it didn’t take so much time (16 percent);
* Only 11 percent of parents with children under 18 that attend school like planning school events and feel they have the perfect system for planning them;
* More than half (53 percent) of parents with children under 18 who attend school said they would rather perform some other tedious task instead of planning an event for their children’s school, including activities such as paying household bills (30%) or getting their teeth cleaned at the dentist (17%).
