Momfluencers Pitch AI as Alternative Coparents

Lilian Schmidt, a brand consultant from Zurich, was at her wit's end. Despite trying every trick in the book, she couldn't get her daughter to sleep. The advice of sleep experts and her pediatrician fell flat - white noise machines, blackout curtains, and massages didn't work.

"Every single day, it took like two to three hours to put her to bed," Schmidt recalls. "She'd scream and fight and we would all be so exhausted and frustrated by the end of the day." When her daughter was 3 and a half years old, Schmidt turned to ChatGPT, a controversial parenting tool at the time. The advice it offered "was completely opposite from everything I'd 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 utter shock, it worked. Within five minutes, her daughter snuggled up next to her and fell asleep.

"I was freaking out," she says. "I was like, 'Oh my God, nobody was able to help me except ChatGPT.'" From there, Schmidt became an AI evangelist. In June 2025, she posted a TikTok video with the caption, "I Turned ChatGPT into my coparent," and it went viral.

Her follower count swelled to 27,000 in just three weeks. She made her own custom GPT, Coparent, and started selling access to it for $37 on her website. Schmidt is part of a growing group of women branding themselves as "momfluencers" - not those who use aspirational imagery to make motherhood more aesthetically pleasing, but those who question whether the labor associated with motherhood is even necessary.

They post videos like "The AI Assistant That's Basically My Mom Brain Now" and "How to Use AI as a Mom," and promote customized prompts or handbooks to moms who "want a coparent who never forgets the sunscreen or asks you to write things down," as Schmidt writes in one TikTok caption. One person relatively absent from Schmidt's content is her longtime partner. In her videos, she's doing most of the parenting labor, including meal prep, grocery shopping, and kiddie arts and crafts.

This reflects reality; moms assume most of the physical and mental labor in US households, with a 2022 Department of Labor survey finding that employed mothers spend an extra 13.5 hours per week doing chores and an average of 12.5 hours per week on childcare - a 40 percent increase from 1975. "It's not that my partner isn't helping, because he is," Schmidt says. "But for women and moms, there is so much invisible labor that you carry and everything is in your hands, and it actually takes time with your kids away from you." Moms flocked to her page once they saw she was using AI "to actually be more present with my kids and to be more emotionally regulated, so I can be a cool mom and a happy mom and not a stressed-out one." Women are less likely to use generative AI in their everyday lives than men, with one 2025 study showing they're more than 20 percent less likely.