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.
Now, when your child enters school, you are magically added to the groups, unasked, by the admin, the mom or dad — who are we kidding, the mom — who manages the list, taking her job very seriously indeed, no phone number left behind.
What used to be a conversation between two parents, or a few, is plopped into a digital chat of 20 people, or 50, or even hundreds of phone numbers, most of which have no names attached. Who was behind the number who sent out the link to the article about finding fentanyl containers on playgrounds with the message: “Beware!” I’ll never know. Who is the number who constantly asks for pictures of the homework that their child forgot at school? No idea! But maybe you should talk to your kid about that instead of messaging 100 people about it every night at 9 p.m. “Love is Blind” is on, please leave me alone.
I’ll admit, these mass group chats can be overwhelming and irritating, and you can get lost trying to keep up. I recently spoke to a mom at a cocktail party who told me that she’d decided to mute her parents’ WhatsApp groups. It was too much to handle, she said, and she never saw the important messages within the cacophony, anyway. So she’d chosen to rely on the official school emails. I gasped: “You’re going to leave?” It’s just a group chat, she said.
What would she really be missing? The WhatsApp groups are filled with overlapping threads and notification overload and the mom who hearts a message about ice hockey practice, then takes away the heart, then hearts it again with the note, “Sorry! I can’t work my phone!” The messages are both useful (“Please check the schedule to see if it’s your child’s turn to bring in the food for the class mouse”) and useless (“Here is a link to an article about vaccine skepticism”) and the update on the kid who lost his first tooth. (“Just wanted to share with you all ,” followed by a smiley emoji).
As parents, we’re tasked with remembering an unrememberable amount of stuff, and WhatsApp groups have saved me more times than I can count. And where else in life do you get the pleasure of peeking inside a hundred other brains of people whom you often have little in common with beyond rearing a small, same-age human? Everyone typing at once, reacting and hearting and vying to be heard, to be a part of something.
I feel like I know all 89 people in my second-grade WhatsApp chat, even the phone numbers that don’t have names. I know the mom with all the right dates, the mom with all the wrong dates, the mom who only says “haha,” the mom who’s constantly asking if we’ve seen her son’s jacket.
Is this actual intimacy? Or just another performative digital stage, where we present a version of the parent we’d like to be? Last year, someone sent a message in our WhatsApp group that her mother had just died. The outpouring of sympathy and support was immediate, with pings and dings and buzzes of “I’m so sorry,” and “Let me know if you need anything,” and “We’re thinking of you and your family.” Heart, heart, crying emoji, heart.
I know it might sound trite, but I’d argue that this exchange was genuine, and that, in the moment, it felt like a community of people who cared about one another. In another stage of life, I’d have rolled my eyes. Sharing a moment of humanity amid an influx of logistical messages about bus schedules and field trip permission slip deadlines? But we have moved so much of our actual selves online now. This is normal. It feels real.
I’m not a particularly active participant in the chats. I will very occasionally chime in with a question about something or an invitation to an event. I send thumbs-up emojis and I heart things. I have — all parents have — big-picture, existential worries, about the world in which our children are growing up, its dangers and injustices and seemingly overwhelming problems. But I’m there in WhatsApp together with everyone else, as we navigate the blessedly quotidian. What should we get Mrs. Rothman for a gift? Where is the soccer game on Saturday? So to that mom who was intent on muting, I’d urge her to reconsider. Instead, please stay with me in the chat.
Emma Rosenblum’s novels include “Bad Summer People” and “Mean Moms.”
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