How to manage multiple repos using submodules?

It seems like submodule isn't meant for this, but many people seems to use submodule to link many smaller repos together. With this setup, I imagine whenever someone pushed a small repo, they're /supposed/ to push the big repo as well. This way, if I simply update the big repo and do a "git status", git will tell me that which of the smaller repos are out of date. However, this is only reliable if everyone remembers to push the big repo. If someone pushed a smaller repo, but forgot to push the big repo, then I won't be aware that some of the smaller repos are out-of-date until I push.

I suppose one way is to do a check/auto-update with pre/post commit script to enforce that the big repo is always up-to-date. Another way is to use the "submodule foreach" to do a fetch and status on smaller ones, but this doesn't seem very elegant.

So, I'm wondering how do people who use submodules this way manage all their repos? Or how to (reliably) get a good sense of the state of the small repos? Or maybe I shouldn't be using submodules this way at all?