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| Juggles 5 text chains totaling 85 people |
The drama increases when there are more children in the household. One kid is the baseline; two is twice as troublesome; three is four times as difficult as one, A household with four kids, and I know of one, sounds like they need a full- time coordinator and AI intelligence to keep things running smoothly.
The headlines go:
Chatty Parent Group Texts Swell
To Dozens of Messages at a Time
Moms and dads wrangle five or more
threads about playdates, sports, pinkeye
I don't know what alphabetical generation this is, but it's clearly a Facebook one that seems the need to tap out a messages or send photos of what they're having at a restaurant.
There's is a woman I worked with who is 20 years younger than me who can't seem to resist including photos of food, boxes of donuts and images of the front of restaurants her fiancé has taken her to for her birthday to me in her occasional emails. She tells me she knows I don't like pictures of food but she does it anyway. It's a disease.
The occupations of the people written about in the piece are all you need to know about the type of person who will ask a group of people how to handle pinkeye. No one seems to pick up a phone and ask the question of a singular person, like maybe Mom? No, they ask a coterie of people who they probably don't really know for medical advice.
The first person described in the story by Tara Weiss is "Jolie Hunt who got her first brush with the reach of WhatsApp during a recent messaging thread of New York City parents arranging a playdate for their first-graders." Ms. Hunt is the mother of two elementary-school children and chief executive of a communications consulting firm. Practice the advice you sell.
WhatsApp is to no surprise owned by the Facebook Meta Platforms. Michelle Yu can field 57 messages a day from parents in three WhatsApp groups that revolve around her son, 5-years-old, and her daughter, 3. People who use the app complain that it becomes a part-time job. It is hard to have any sympathy for a group of people who are creating their own hell and jumping into it.
Ms. Yu is the founder of a Washington, D.C. firm that helps companies ease parents back to work after leave. Yep, that's a profession. Bless her heart. You can make money doing that.
The woman pictured above, Vanessa Bennett, is co-author of "This is So Awkward" a book about adolescence. Her biggest fear is putting something out there that is the wrong comment in the wrong chain. World War III will I suppose break out. It's nerve racking.
Why join all these groups? FOMO. Fear of missing out on something they need to know, like when is soccer practice been rescheduled for. Ms. Bennett inserts herself into text groups that total 85 people! My wife and I never knew 85 people raising two daughter very active in swimming and running, and of course school.
Ms. Brody tells us, "I'm scared to take myself off [the lists] since it's a way of organizing the mental load around two different schools, two different grades and two different basketball teams."
Ms. Brody is a founder of The Fifth Trimester, an organization that promotes gender equality in the workplace. No wonder these people are nearly having a nervous breakdown.
Nancy A. Cheever, a psychology professor at California State University, Dominguez Hills and an expert on smart phone addictions (emphasis mine) tells us it is impossible to know if a phone ping is a school emergency or just someone in a group chat sending a heart emoji, making texts difficult to ignore. "People judge notifications and alerts as all having the same weight." I see the problem. Turn the damn thing off altogether.
Nowhere in the lively piece is anyone a plumber, tradesman, roofer or a truck driver. At least there are people who have some sense.
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