The Hearth Display Changed How I Manage My Family

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Credit: Jordan Calhoun / Lifehacker

At the start of this year, I experienced a dramatic change in the way I live: I went from a childless adult to a father of two kids. I had chosen to become a foster dad and was placed with two 14-year-old twin girls who, as you might imagine, inevitably became the focus of my life. But while many of the challenges of becoming a new parent were difficult, one of the more unexpected ones was how much I was meant to remember. Despite being the type of person who manages a Google calendar, to-do list app, mood tracker, activity tracker, and strives for Inbox Zero, becoming a parent was a lesson in the limits of my own systems. I forgot volleyball practices and test dates. I lost track of the chores and whether they were done. I relied on the girls to communicate their needs—permission slips, school events, what they wanted from the grocery store—and to simply integrate those tasks into my personal habits.

But using my own calendars, apps, and personal management systems failed on two fronts. First, they relied on a losing combination: communication from children and the memory of an adult. Second, they failed to teach the organization skills I wanted my kids to learn to become more independent, organized, capable people themselves.

I was testing out a new system—two whiteboard calendars on the refrigerator, more desperate than smart—when I read an article called The Couples Who Run Their Families Like A Corporation on Romper. I shared the link with my friends in a group chat that same morning. "I wanted to make fun of this," I said, "but after reading it, I think 'corporation' is an exaggeration and can see the appeal. That 'Hearth' product seems especially useful, honestly." Shortly after that conversation, I decided to test the Hearth Display to see if learning the tablet was worth the price tag I was wary about. Three months later, I can see how Hearth has changed how I manage my family.

What is a Hearth Display?

Hearth is a touchscreen family organization tool—essentially a tablet that functions as a calendar, to-do list tracker, and routine planner. For my family, its centralized location has proven to be the most important benefit to owning one. My Hearth Display is in the living room, next to our TV, and I love having a hub that keeps everyone's needs and responsibilities in a prominent place. Having a Hearth means there's a single location for family logistics like schedules and chores, and that I can answer most family management questions with "did you add it to the calendar?" or "did you check it off your list?"

Here's what came with my Hearth Display

The Hearth is a 27-inch 1080p vertical display screen with a frame that comes in three different color options: light wood, matte white, and matte black. Mine is matte black. It took about three weeks for my Hearth to arrive, and it came in a no-frills box with a wall mount, installation guide, and power cord. Installation requires a drill, but otherwise it's pretty straightforward. The power cord is eight feet long, and the mount has a holder where you can wrap around the excess cord length. The display doesn't come with a cable cover, though, so while most promo images of a Hearth Display have a sleek cable cover that blends into the wall and makes the tablet appear to float, the default reality is an ugly, white cord dangling under the device to the nearest outlet unless you take care of it yourself. The Hearth also comes with a camera near the top of its screen, but there's no use for it yet, so I keep it shuttered.

Setting up Hearth family profiles

An unexpectedly fun aspect of setting up our Hearth was choosing a family name, which displays on the top of our screen. If you want to keep it simple, you can obviously go with convention and put "The Smith Family" or whatever, and you never think about it again. But for my four-person family with three last names between us, choosing a family name for our account was a minor culture-defining moment. We brainstormed silly names and made fun of each other's suggestions until we agreed on a Spider-Man theme, and "Spider-Fam" was born. Our screensaver (known as "Privacy Mode" on the Hearth) is a picture of Peter Parker, Miles Morales, and Spider-Gwen from Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse.

Aside from a family name, each family member has a profile and a designated color for calendar events, tasks, and individualized morning and evening routines. Profile pictures are customizable, but they're illustrated baby dinosaur avatars by default. Given that there are four options—a baby T-Rex, brontosaurus, stegosaurus, and triceratops—we liked our avatars enough to leave them by default instead of changing them to our favorite Spider characters. We'll change them eventually, which can be done on the app under hamburger menu > Manage Family.

What I like about the Hearth Display

I use the Hearth Display for a family of four: me, two kids, and a partner. There are four tabs that navigate to the Hearth's three main functions, which are the calendar, to-do lists, and routines. (A fourth tab is for the Hearth Helper, which I find to be a useless tab that takes up space, but more on that later.) The calendar and to-do lists are the most-used features in my home, and replaced the whiteboard calendars on my refrigerator and the daily to-do lists that I would write on a notepad by hand. Using the calendar took a bit of practice, as my kids were never in the habit of keeping track of their schedules beyond simply going to school. It took about two weeks' worth of reminders to add their tutoring sessions and volleyball practices to the calendar, and I made a mantra out of saying of events, "If it's not on the Hearth, it doesn't exist." For adults, the calendar is simple and straightforward, and I simply synced my personal Google calendar (it also syncs with iCal and Outlook). The Hearth calendar tab has a day, week, and monthly view, and the week view has become standard for our home.

The to-do lists are organized by family member, so each person can be assigned tasks, and they were the easiest feature for my kids to use regularly. Naturally, I assign the most tasks, and my kids mostly focus their energy on checking items from their list. I've been using our lists to reverse roles too, though, to help them build the habit of communicating their needs. If they need new shoes, a permission slip, or anything else, they're learning that a surefire way to get what they want is to add it to my to-do list. They also use it to send messages, add excessive emojis, and generally be silly.

Initially, I ruled out using the "routines" feature altogether, assuming that we were too old for needing to systematize habits like washing our faces and brushing our teeth, and getting a celebration animation when we completed each task. About a month into using our Hearth, though, me and one daughter decided to give it a try, making an evening routine that we would do together each night: floss, brush our teeth, wash our face, and set out clothes for the next day. I'm confident that the routine would never work if left to her to do alone, but it's become a nightly bonding moment where I complain about how slowly she flosses, and she chastises me if I fail to moisturize. I still feel that the full-screen celebratory animation after each task should be an optional setting, though. It might be reinforcing for younger kids, but it adds unnecessary lag and can feel patronizing for those who aren't so little.

Obviously, the Hearth Display has a beautiful design as well. It looks like a big picture frame, and it gets compliments and questions whenever guests visit.

My biggest frustrations with the Hearth Display

Most of my frustrations with Hearth I can attribute to the newness of their product. Its app just released this year—a feature that early adopters had been waiting for since the tablet originally launched. I experienced a few crashes in my short time using it, but most frustrating have been syncing errors with the calendar. In one glitch, for example, I can schedule an event from the app for, say, 1 p.m., and the event syncs on the calendar for the wrong time—at, say, 9 p.m. I often end up deleting the event and re-adding it directly from the Hearth itself, as trying to troubleshoot the problem from the app can sometimes cause it to crash.

The calendar also doesn't automatically assign colors to specific profiles. For example, even though my daughter has an orange triceratops avatar and we want to use that color to see her schedule at a glance, her assigned events are not orange by default. She has to create her event and remember to manually change the color of her event from blue to orange (or, more likely, I will do it for her when I notice a confusing-looking calendar event using the wrong color). It can feel tedious to manually choose the calendar color for each event you create, especially when our family is using the default avatars and color options.

Other technical challenges include the inability to simply touch a day on the calendar to add an event (you have to click a plus sign in the bottom-right corner, followed by "add event"), the inability to view a calendar in isolation (for example, I can't filter the calendar view to see only my schedule at a glance, or one of the kids'), and an occasional but noticeable lag after button presses.

And while the page layout is simple and intuitive, even for kids, I find one of the four tabs that organize the Hearth layout to be oddly unhelpful, out of place, and a waste of space. Users can click the "Helper" tab if they want to text or email customer service to upload a list of events on their behalf—think, bulk uploading a school calendar worth of events. In theory, it sounds nice, but if you've ever looked at a school calendar, you likely would never want its entirety clogging up your family calendar.

I also felt it fair to assume that "Hearth Helper" was synonymous with "customer service" when I was dealing with a syncing issue, but you actually can't reach customer service from the Helper tab. For me, the Helper isn't useful enough to be a prominent tab alongside the calendar, lists, and routines, and it looks to be simply filling space to appear more feature-heavy. If anything, a simple question mark in the corner of the screen would do just fine.

How much does a Hearth subscription cost?

A Hearth Display costs $699. In advance of Black Friday, a Hearth is currently $499 during their "Best Sale of the Year." To use its full functionality, though, you also need a subscription: A Hearth Display subscription costs $9 per month or $86 annually. Without a subscription, a Hearth Display is limited to its basic calendar functionality, so I recommend being ready to pay for the membership if you're willing to order one.

The pros and cons of using a Hearth display to manage my family

Pros:

It helps organize and maintain multiple schedules.

It creates a centralized hub for family management.

It allows everyone to create, assign, and mark off chores, groceries, and to-do list items.

It looks great; the Hearth Display has a beautiful design that looks like a digital picture frame.

Cons

It's expensive.

Its app is new, can be glitchy, and features are still limited.

Is a Hearth Display worth it?

The Hearth Display replaced my whiteboard calendars, chore charts, grocery list, and to-do lists, and I will never go back. Of course, how much you're willing to spend for an organizational tool is a personal decision, and if you wanted to avoid the cost and were industrious enough, you could rig a comparable product out of an Android tablet and various apps. But given that I don't have the time or inclination to build a makeshift version of what Hearth offers, I'm thrilled with my Hearth and what it brings to my family: better communication, organization, and accountability than we ever had before.