It's time we agreed that kids' admin isn't just a 'mum job'

"My husband is great so I shouldn't complain... but kid admin has been left to me in nearly every capacity since our children were born," writes mum Shona.

I have a gripe. One big, frustrating, unfair gripe that I must vent about.

Kid admin.

When I say kid admin, I mean the mountains of paperwork, forms, apps, correspondence, applications and updates associated with our kids.

To be honest, because they are spread out just enough, most of the time I sort of forget how much work and time they amount to; and this can create the illusion that you don’t mind filling out the one-millionth form about your child’s medical history, or allergy information.

But it’s not just the forms alone; what also bugs me is that it is often deemed a 'mum job'.

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Shona and her kids. Image: Supplied

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My husband forwarded me an email

You see, a few weeks ago, when my inbox dinged with a form forwarded to me by my husband, a profile proforma to be filled out for both our daughters, with the message to the requester “I’ll get my wife to do this, she is much better than this sort of thing than me,” well then, the kid admin workload became very apparent.

Now, for full disclosure, my husband is great. He does his absolute fair share of household tasks and parenting tasks so I shouldn't complain. But I will because kid admin has been left to me for nearly every form that has ever been sent our way since both our children were born.

As I look back over the years, I have come to realise that 99% of all permission forms, lunch orders, passport applications, health appointment forms, extracurricular activity paperwork, enrolment applications, school absence approvals, attendance responses on sporting apps, parent-teacher interview bookings, birth certificate paperwork, daycare and kinder forms... have all been completed by me.

And upon the most recent form, the forwarded email, which was a nanny service asking for information about our kids and their routine (which my husband is also acutely aware of), a very simple and brief form to complete, I wondered why I was ‘better than him and doing this sort of thing’?

Source: supplied.

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"You've always done this stuff"

I mean it is a form, with simple questions and in reality, it probably took him longer to reply to them and then send it to me than it would have to fill out in the first place.

When I asked my husband this very question, he replied by saying “you’ve always done this stuff.” And while true, it made me wonder why the f*ck have I?

But it’s not just me in this form-filling boat, I know many other friends in the same one. They too always ‘just done this stuff’ and do it without really thinking about it, or ever forwarding it onto their husbands or partners to do instead.

So, what is it about kid admin that has so many husband's forwarding forms on? I mean are they allergic to them? Do they have sudden bouts of kid information amnesia which prevents these facts transitioning from their brains to paper?

Is it just never even a consideration that they too can complete these forms? Are they afraid that they won't actually remember their child’s date of birth (no judgement, I too have been there)?  Are they just so used it other people filling out these forms that doing it themselves seems alien to them? Are they just lazy?

To be honest, I have no bloody idea what the answer is to this question, but it annoys me.

It annoys me because this nanny form which was for a one-night occasion while we attended a destination wedding was the simplest form ever created. I mean it had questions like – what time does your child go to bed? And what is their routine before bed? Things that my husband is a part of every. Single. Night. And there were only about five questions in total.

I mean, really?!

But it also annoys me because reflecting on all the kid admin (that I could recall), I realised, f*ck, I have spent a lot of time and energy completing these by myself.

However, what really gets me, what really has me hot under the collar is that I have always just done them and not even realised. Well, that is until now…

Originally published as It's time we agreed that kids' admin isn't just a 'mum job'