Poisonous parents on WhatsApp? You know who you are

Between the dahlias with heads the size of dinner plates and the tibouchina blooms fairly bursting from the trees, the grounds at your typical private school make it an unofficial outpost of the Botanic Garden, albeit one that has an entry fee of $35,000 and an inescapable panorama of hormonal teenagers.

Like the gardens themselves, the surroundings are fragrant and beautiful. They have been lovingly curated and carefully tended. The lawns are manicured with surgical precision. There are birds (not ugly ones or anything – presumably, those are shot on sight), but critically, there are no weeds. This being nature, they are no doubt dropped there from time to time (probably by the ugly birds), but anything bold enough to send a shoot up from the soil is met with a metric tonne of herbicide so potent that its descendants’ descendants will be instantly rendered sterile.

Graphic by Monique Westermann.Credit:

The gardens are, in fact, a microcosm of the private schools themselves: magnificent, storied, mystical places where beauty is the gold standard and nothing ugly survives. Poor HSC results? You’re reading the league tables wrong! Bullying? Not tolerated here! Entrenched drug problems? Only if academic excellence is your narcotic of choice!

The thing about weeds, though, is that once they’ve found fertile ground, they’re perfectly capable of shapeshifting. And before you know it, they’ve popped up in the only place herbicide is incapable of reaching: the school WhatsApp group.

We refer here, of course, to that most toxic and diabolical species of weed, the poison parent. Much like its horticultural equivalent, it exists to propagate. Then, having achieved its only goal, it spends the rest of its miserable existence asserting its dominance over everything in its path.

Yesterday, Barker College principal Phillip Heath described it as “an act of futility to stop or control” gossip and rumours circulating in school WhatsApp groups. An unnamed NSW public high school principal went further, likening the authors to “mean girls” and decrying their posts as “nasty, bitchy stuff”.

Human weeds, in other words. The poison parent is not to be confused with other irritating but infinitely less noxious varietals: the ones who treat WhatsApp as a personal assistant (“What time is band practice again?”) a priest (“OMG, I sent my kid in the wrong uniform!” ) or the accidental recipient of a photo of their manky ingrown fingernail (hopefully meant for the urgent attention of a hand surgeon, albeit one who is on the clock at 6.48am).

Despite routinely demonstrating the same woeful lack of boundaries, the poison parent’s primary objective is not to have fellow posters gouge their own eyes out so much as to respond to its entreaties to grab a pitchfork and a blazing torch and follow it into glorious battle against the school. Fellow posters will go first, though. The poison parent specialises in inciting the mob and then forming a rearguard action. Or maybe it won’t bother showing up at all.

The poison parent has an emotional range that starts at blistering disappointment and ends at shrieking moral outrage. Despite its high-flying real-world career as a legal muckety-muck, it has no use for grammar, syntax, nuance, or, indeed, anything that will slow down the borderline incoherent rant against the school that it is currently quilling at 11.04pm on a Saturday.

Anything is capable of triggering its rage. A rumour about what went down at the school camp. A decision to go co-ed. A missing lunch order at the canteen. The novel selection for year 9 English.

In keeping with its fondness for a mindless pile-on, the poison parent is a horrifying combination of mad oversharer and deranged conspiracy theorist. Last week, it heard that the maths teacher (who it hates, BTW) was leaving at the end of the year, as is the head of languages, along with the drama coach. It has concluded this mass exodus is a vote of no confidence in the principal, despite the fact that the maths teacher in question is 68, the head of languages is moving overseas with her family, and the drama coach is actually going on maternity leave.

The poison parent is rarely sighted in person at the school itself on account of its morbid fear of any form of combat not involving a keypad.

Long-suffering class parents have passed on screenshots of it in action, so its handiwork precedes it, and there was that one occasion where its mask of normality slipped, and it inexplicably burst into tears during a parent-teacher interview. In a venerable institution more comfortable with traditions than train wrecks, there was a moment of embarrassed silence, and then everyone pretended nothing ever happened.

Keep calm and carry a canister of herbicide, as a private school gardener might say. Weedkiller works wonders when it’s sprayed at close range.

Michelle Cazzulino is a writer and parent.

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