They’re back. After a summer of dormancy, the parents’ WhatsApp group chats are waking up like sleepy teenagers, the buzzes and dings gradually increasing as we run out the clock on August. At first, it was just a few — someone chiming in to remind everyone about after-school registration. A couple of replies, saying thanks for the info, hope everyone is having a great end of summer, a few hearts and thumbs-up. Then more started to appear, with links to baseball programs, travel soccer questions and someone asking: “When is the first day of school? I should know this.”
Soon, the groups will return in full force, notifications ding-ding-dinging all day and sometimes well into the night.
At any given time, I belong to around 10 parents’ WhatsApp groups: Some are permanent, like one for each of my sons’ classes and a couple for sports like soccer and tennis. Throughout the year, subgroups pop up, depending on need. A group named for an 8-year-old’s birthday (the pictures from Rye Playland were adorable); one called “Islanders Game Bus #1” (the Islanders won; the boys had a blast!). They keep chattering on.
Kids’ after-school schedules, homework, car pool, birthday parties and teacher gifts. What field to meet at, what coach to call, what doctor is best, what color shirt to wear that day. Sometimes — ding! — it’s as simple as the weather: “It’s going to rain, don’t forget an umbrella for drop-off!” Sometimes — ding! — it’s so hilariously passive-aggressive that it compels me to take a screenshot and send it to another, smaller WhatsApp group, with a different name, something like “haters,” accompanied by a laughing-crying emoji.
Before WhatsApp, how did anyone find out … anything? I asked my mother, who said that we used to come home with notes in our backpacks about school events. Otherwise, she’d consult the school calendar. She’d get a printout of my soccer schedule at the beginning of the season, post it on the refrigerator, and it wouldn’t change. And she reminded me of phone chains. Starting at 6 a.m., one mom would call another to tell her that it was a snow day, and then that mom would call the next, moving down the line alphabetically. Sometime in the early 2000s, phone chains moved to group emails, then text chains.
The WhatsApp craze started during the pandemic, when schooling from home became a nightmarish collection of Zooms and laptop homework assignments and different apps (all with soul-crushing names, like Brainly and Syllabird) and different passwords for each one. Parents needed a place to info-share in real time, which seems to be why these enormous group chats were born.
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