AS a mutiny afoot in the Tanner family when 15-year-old Melissa began deleting appointments from her father's datebook? No, explained John Tanner, Melissa's father. The Tanners, who live in Pasadena, Calif., had recently begun using a shared calendar program for the Palm computers that he, his wife and Melissa use.

"She didn't quite get what we were doing, and she would see things on this calendar on her Palm and say, `Oh, that doesn't have anything to do with me — I'll delete it,' " Mr. Tanner said.

Such are the perils of family scheduling in the digital world, where tools like PC-based calendars and combination cellphone-organizers help parents and children coordinate busy lives. The refrigerator door may someday be wired to the Internet, but in the meantime, the chip is replacing the magnet as the crucial link in many households. And while such families are technologically adept enough to own Palms or use calendar software, they are hardly all computer experts.

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These are "not your leading-edge Seattle techies here," said Cynthia Ewer, editor of OrganizedHome.com, a home management site. "These are average folks that are finding these tools just make it so much simpler."

Ken Fischer, for instance, a Manhattan-based photographer, uses a calendar program called Now Up-to-Date & Contact to coordinate the schedule of visitors to his Connecticut country house. "We used to send faxes back and forth maybe 10, 20 times over the summer with schedules," said Mr. Fischer, whose calendar tracks his wife, Robin Cohen; their two children. Samantha, 2 1/2, and Scotty, 6 months; their nanny; and Mr. Fischer's parents. "And it got very complicated because each time you would look at the schedule, you would have to check what the changes were."

Mr. Fischer's system allows his father, Carl, who also lives in Manhattan and uses Now Up-to-Date, to enter his schedule into a calendar they both control. Because Mr. Fischer has a Palm, every time he synchronizes the device with his main computer, he has a portable version of the family schedule.

"Now I don't even think about our summer schedule," he said. "My father makes his changes. We make our changes. And we know just by looking at it who's going to be where. That's made a huge change."

The children's nanny, who doesn't use a computer, keeps up to date by consulting a printed schedule. And Mr. Fischer's wife and mother can check a version of the calendar that is available on the Web. Mr. Fischer said his mother, Marilyn Fischer, used it to track her grandchildren's whereabouts.

But does she always check the computer?

"Sometimes she does, yes," he said, his voice an unreconciled mix of enthusiasm and frustration. "Other times, she doesn't. It's a long process."

Using computers to coordinate a group's schedule is not new. Businesses have long used groupware products from companies like Lotus and Microsoft to help employees arrange meetings and share contacts. But those systems are costly and require server computers, making them impractical for home users.

During the dot-com boom, many companies viewed Web-based calendars as a low-cost way for families to coordinate their schedules. Yahoo and Microsoft's MSN.com and smaller sites like PowerGroups.com and FamilyTime.com, for example, offered calendars that allowed multiple users to make entries. But none of those tools attracted a mass following for reasons ranging from privacy concerns to the inconvenience of having to consult the Web for scheduling information.

The current wave of families keeping group schedules owes much to the growing number of households with PC's and the rise in palmtop usage among mainstream consumers, who often use those devices' scheduling programs. The number of families with at least one PC and one palmtop computer grew from 900,000 in 2000 to 3.6 million this year, according to MetaFacts, a market research firm in San Diego.

The digital schedulers include Jennifer Shelamer of Alachua, Fla., a mother of two and an avid Palm user. Her husband, her father and her 10-year-old daughter are also Palm users. Ms. Shelamer uses a program called WeSync, which helps automate the transfer of information between Palm-based calendars.

The program allows her and her husband, Chuck, to coordinate the children's schedules on their Palms. "We weren't having the time to sit down and go through our week," she said. "Now I don't have to remember to sit down and do it with them. I do it on my Palm, it gets on his Palm. We don't have to think about it."

The WeSync program works in conjunction with the built-in Palm calendar. Each time a Palm user enters an event, it can be marked for transmission to another WeSync user. The next time both Palms are synchronized to an Internet-connected computer, the entry is made onto the target Palm, with the data transmitted through a WeSync server.

Ms. Shelamer and her father, Bernie Haskins, run a livestock feed business together. WeSync helps ensure that neither schedules trips that would leave the office empty. But Ms. Shelamer does have one lament: "Sometimes there's a problem with my dad, who doesn't always hot-synch as often as he should."

Ms. Ewer, the OrganizedHome .com editor, advocates a simpler alternative to programs like WeSync: the infrared beam function on virtually all palmtop computers that lets users wirelessly send information between devices.

"Most family synchronization routines can be done pretty simply using the beam function," she said. For updates on their son, for example, "my husband and I can go out on the deck, sit down with our martinis and our Palms, and I can say, `Oh, by the way, Brandon is in China — let me give you his contact information," she said.

Some families, however, welcome the chance to deploy more sophisticated solutions. In addition to using WeSync for scheduling, the Tanner family jointly manages shopping lists. Each of their address books contains a contact whose "notes" section lists items that need to be purchased. Because their contacts are shared each time they synchronize, each of them always has a list of what the others need.

Mr. Tanner has also been working on speeding up the time-consuming process of transmitting data from one WeSync user to another. His solution is the Kyocera Smartphone, a combination cellphone and Palm device. The unit can instantly transmit calendar information to an Internet-connected computer or to another similarly equipped device. The Tanners' inaugural Kyocera went to Melissa, who needed a cellphone.

It worked well enough to convince Mr. Tanner and his wife, Linda, to purchase Smartphones for themselves. That leaves Melissa's old Palm unused. Mr. Tanner's 10-year-old, Michelle, is eyeing it, and he is inclined to let her join in. "We'll just have to experiment," he said, "to see if she can get in the habit of synching."