> a million different versions of which will get them bad press: “Apple told me to go and pick up my dead child’s cancer medication!”

This is a very tricky one.

>> Know that my son has a test on Thursday and hasn’t opened the revision material since Monday. A gentle nudge, not a surveillance report

This feels like a surveillance report to me. The extent to which adults should surveil their children's devices is hotly disputed. There's one faction which thinks total surveillance should be mandatory (as a solution to the age verification problem or otherwise), and others which believe that children can and should have privacy (are you absolutely sure you should be monitoring your seventeen year old's conversation with their girlfriend?).

Not to mention that it's tracking a family member's interaction with a third party. We can pre-emptively assume the school knows and approves about this one, at least.

> Track our medication schedule and ping people (or me, if someone misses a window) without turning into a clinical monitoring tool.

This feels like the sort of thing where you have weeks of meetings trying to work out whether HIPAA applies or not. It would definitely be valuable. It's also a problem if it's wrong, even if that's entirely down to user error. So people make do with the adhoc version of general purpose calendar entries.

(not to mention the period tracker use case: you want to be careful with technologies which provide an evidence trail that the government have announced they want to use against you)