There are many parts of parenting for which it’s impossible to prepare, be it the first late-night trip to urgent care with a miserable, feverish toddler or a big question about sex or death asked at an inopportune moment. But perhaps the most mundanely irritating of these surprises is the vast amount of paperwork that follows children, like Pigpen’s unrelenting cloud of dust.

At minimum, this secretarial work levies a time and emotional tax on parents. At worst, paperwork can become an obstacle to getting financial help, medical insurance, aid for college or even an elementary school education. Lightening the bureaucratic load on parents would give them back time when they need it most and help ensure they don’t miss out on important experiences or resources to let their families thrive.

These drifts of paperwork begin accumulating even before babies arrive in the world, when working parents figure out how to cover time off with a newborn. Those lucky enough to have access to paid leave have to document their eligibility and figure out how employer benefits interact with state offerings.

When researchers at the policy consultancy New Practice Lab explored New Jersey’s paid family leave program in 2019, they found that the applications were worded so confusingly that families had to guess how to respond. One participant said she relied on a Facebook moms group to navigate the process, since neither state workers nor her own human resources department knew how to help.

Immediately after having a baby, it’s on parents to request vital documents such as birth certificates. As my news-side colleague Ellie Silverman recently reported, families who give birth in nontraditional settings might find themselves literally unable to document their children’s existence. She followed a Black couple who chose to have their second child at home without the help of a midwife or doula, and couldn’t get him into his pediatrician for weeks, only to find themselves unable to meet D.C.’s requirements to get the little boy his birth certificate. There are good public health reasons to encourage new parents to maintain contact with the medical system, but there seems little rationale — or mercy — in leaving families to such legal purgatory.

“I can’t physically show that my son belongs to me because I have no document. And I might now have to go to court to prove my fathership to my child,” the baby’s father told Silverman.

New life stages bring new paperwork. While reporting an Associated Press series on chronic absenteeism in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, Bianca Vázquez Toness discovered that some families were stymied by the task of assembling the documents to re-enroll students in school. Those schools typically require health and dental forms to be filled out by doctors and returned on deadline for each child — and some offices have taken to charging for those forms.

Sometimes paperwork can almost seem to be an intentional barrier. Take the purging of Medicaid rolls as the COVID-19 public health emergency came to an end. Joan Alker, the executive director of Georgetown University’s children and families center, estimates that as many as 71% of the people who have lost coverage so far have done so because of trouble navigating the re-enrollment process.

The problem affects kids even into their college years. After the federal government introduced a new version of the Free Application for Federal Student Aid form this past year, the number of submissions fell by more than half. Glitches and delays are now slowing aid offers to students. Unless schools push back their deadlines, some families might have to make enrollment decisions without knowing what schools intend to charge them.

Certainly, our American educational, medical and government benefits systems are too large and complicated to run simply on trust. And paperwork sometimes plays a bigger role than mere record-keeping: requiring parents to submit their children’s vaccination records to schools, for instance, keeps kids on track with their shots.

Some solutions are rooted in simple design architecture. Make applications available online. Optimize them for cellphones, since not all families have computers at home. Automatically save responses. Eliminate unnecessary and redundant questions.

Consolidating information can also help. Programs serving families can be clustered under the same agency or website, so parents don’t have to go from department to department to seek out similar kinds of aid. In 2022, for example, South Carolina rolled out a single form to determine eligibility for more than 40 different initiatives, even though not all those programs have the same funding stream.