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How Google Drive Can Make Parenting Easier
Seven surprising ways Google Docs, Sheets, and Forms can improve your family’s life
I’ve been a parent for 16 years and a Google Drive user for 13. (Such an enthusiastic user, in fact, that I’ve appeared as an unpaid expert on Google’s Digital Wellbeing site.) And somewhere along the way, those two roles began to blend together.
If you use Google Drive at work, you already know that sharing docs, spreadsheets, and folders can make it easier to collaborate with colleagues. But it can also make it easier to co-parent, coordinate with your kids, and generally impose some degree of order on the chaos that comes with family life. Here’s how:
Family policy manual
More than a dozen years ago, I wrote a social-media policy for our family. It started partly as a joke, but I’ve since come to embrace it — and to reproduce it, many times over, for other things. I’ve discovered it’s very helpful to have various household rules and policies documented in a way that’s accessible to parents, children, and other caregivers.
Our Google Drive policy folder offers a peek into the different areas where we’ve had conflict over the years: We’ve had to introduce a toy cupboard policy, a Minecraft policy, a candy policy, and a…
