If you’re a parent with a child in school or day care, chances are you’ve had to field phone calls during your workday to come pick them up when they’re sick, OK minor first-aid treatments or talk through issues with teachers and staff. These sorts of calls aren’t uncommon, but Dr. Raina Brands, a university professor and gender equality expert, has noticed a troubling trend with these child-centric updates: Too often, moms are the first and only person notified.
After taking multiple calls from her son’s day care in a single day, even after instructing them to call her partner first, Brands took to Twitter to vent about the way moms are frequently treated as the default parent. Her important Twitter thread has since gone viral because far too many parents can relate.
“Our son has been in daycare since the beginning of the year. If he is sick and needs to come home early, they call me,” Brands writes. “If they want to give him paracetamol, they call me. If he has injured himself they call me.”
The problem is that Brands has repeatedly asked day care staff to call her partner first if their son needs something. “I have asked them to put a note on my file about that,” she writes. “I have asked the manager. Today they called and I asked them to always call my partner first and two hours later they called me again.”
Brands says her request that they call her partner first isn’t new or recent. He handles most of the tasks associated with day care and has always been the main point of contact. “He filled out all of the forms, he did all of the settling-in sessions and he drops our son off every morning,” she explains. “But they are incapable of viewing him as a primary caregiver.”
Brands’s post struck a nerve with other parents, who say they’ve dealt with the same thing from their children’s schools, doctor’s offices and almost every other place involved with their child’s care. “My husband is the [point of contact] for our kids. He and I were hanging out one day, my phone was upstairs. When I finally got it, there were thirteen missed calls from the school,” one person writes. “My kid had thrown up and instead of calling him, they left increasingly hostile messages.”
One doctor says she gets called about her child so often, it’s become a “running joke” in the operating room. “The nurse will answer my phone and say Dr. Mitchell is scrubbed in, please call her husband who is the primary contact,” she writes. “Same with the pediatrician’s office calling with appointment reminders.”
Treating moms as the default parent is problematic for a number of reasons. Not only does it increase the load moms already carry and interrupt important work they may be doing, but it also undermines the role of fathers. Many dads commented on Brands’s thread and said they are stay-at-home parents or primary caregivers, and it’s a major issue when they aren’t the first to be notified about things their kids needs.
“I was a single father with sole custody,” one dad writes. “They would continually insist on calling her mother first even though the mother would even tell them I am the main contact.”
Moms who have full-time jobs still tend to be responsible for the lion’s share of child care and household labor. They’re more likely than dads to clean, grocery shop, care for kids and cook, according to a 2020 Gallup poll. And these burdens aren’t only being placed on them by their families or partners. As Brands’s experience proves, sexist ideas about gender roles are upheld by many people outside the home as well. Even when people have a choice to involve dads, too often they make the choice to burden moms instead.
No matter how equally parents may divide tasks and labor at home, it’s difficult to achieve true equality among parents who work unless the rest of the world gets on the same page as well. Dads are parents, too, and it’s way past time for their phone numbers on the emergency contact forms to be put to good use.