'The school mental load is killing me'

“I’ve had nine emails from the school in three days - then there’s the apps and WhatsApp groups to keep up with,” the exhausted Sydney mum reveals. “It’s out of control and needs to stop.”

Alison is a Sydney-based, married mum-of two children, aged 10 and 7, who works full time in a corporate role.

Of all the responsibilities she juggles on a daily basis, it is the mental load from her children’s public primary school that she believes is causing her and other parents unnecessary stress and a whole lot of wasted time.

Things have changed so much since my daughter started school five years ago, and I have no doubt a lot of that is due to parents’ saying the school needs to keep them more informed. 

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There’s this expectation that parents need to approve absolutely everything our kids are involved in, and I believe it should be more left up to the people who are the experts in our children’s education - the teachers.

At first, when permission slips went online, I thought, ‘Oh, great!’ because my son would constantly misplace them. 

But over time, more and more correspondence has gone online and now it seems like we get told everything, three times in three different ways. The volume is just so huge every single week.

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Alison with her family. Picture: Supplied

"I decide if I'll open or delete an email by the subject line"

We get emails, an app for lunch orders, another app for school information - which has a lot of crossover with what we get in the emails - one app to see the kids’ schoolwork, then you have the OOSH (out of school hours services) app and multiple WhatsApp groups for the classes and activities my kids are in. 

Then there are the Google Docs forms to fill out whenever permission is needed for anything. If something is happening at the school, you’ll get an email about it, something will pop up on the app, then you’ll get a screenshot about it in the class WhatsApp group about it.

In the past three days alone, I’ve had nine emails from school. One of them was just about Education Week being next month which I didn’t understand why it needed to be a standalone email rather than be grouped in a general update with several other upcoming events. 

Then another was school sports day which needed me to fill in what events my kids were participating in. Surely they can work it out themselves at school, right? 

Because the volume is so high, I pretty much decide if I’ll open it or delete the email by the subject line. Or I might ask my husband if he’s read any to save me from doing some that week. 

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Alison said the mental load from school was getting too much for her and her husband. Picture: Supplied

"The class parent WhatsApp groups are out of control"

My husband is sent everything I am and we decided that we would both be across everything as we both work just as hard as each other in our full time jobs and it’s not fair to put it on one person. 

He is nominated as the primary parent to call if anything happens at school because I work far from school and often travel, and his office is very close, but almost every time, the school still calls me first. They don’t even check the record first.

With all this added communication, there is such a higher level of expectation of parents being involved with the school than the previous generation had. It’s overwhelming our lives.

I just spent two hours on a Saturday entering all our personal information, including phone numbers for GPs and dentists, asking friends for digital images of their IDs as there needs to be a backup person for pick up, digging up Centrelink CRN numbers all into the new OOSH app the school has transferred over to. 

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For my second child, I had to do it all over again as the information couldn’t be duplicated from the first child. So frustrating!

Then the class parent WhatsApp groups are out of control. There will be very long conversations about the temperature of the classrooms and people sending in thermometers with their kids to check the temperature and people going overboard like that. 

There were 93 messages in a 24-hour period. It was so insane I had to mute it! Then a few weeks later there was another debate about why a teacher was off sick, as if a teacher isn’t allowed to be sick, which is ridiculous. 

My husband had enough of it as well and actually asked the group to just reserve messages for information and I thought, ‘Oh, no, this is not going to end well’. 

I imagine lots of side conversations would have sprung up about his message, but I don’t care because it actually worked.

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"Does it have to be every single day?"

I know the school has important information to share, but does it have to be every single day? 

Could there not be an update at the end of the week with everything you need to know? 

We feel like EA’s (executive assistants) for our kids as well as taxi drivers, and on top of working full time and taking care of the home, when are we supposed to make time to take care of our physical and mental health? 

I would like to send something to the school to consolidate the messaging but you worry it’s going to be a black mark against your kids if you do complain. It’s a tough position we’re all put in. 

We just can’t keep going this way because the admin just to keep our kids in school is completely out of control.

Originally published as 'The school mental load is killing me'