NYC parents on school WhatsApp group chats: ‘Oh my God, it’s hell’

When the final bells of the school year ring next month, local parents may be sad to leave behind the steady routine of the school day and the fleeting conversations in the pickup line. But one thing they might not miss? The class WhatsApp chats, which can overload parents with information and, sometimes, endless gossip and speculation.

“Oh my God, it’s hell,” said one Brooklyn parent. “Probably once a week I’ll try to skim through, but there’s so much noise.”

She, like several parents interviewed for this story, asked not to be publicly identified out of fear of retaliation from other parents or her school community.

She’s among the thousands of New York City parents who are or have been in a school WhatsApp group chat. These group chats are holdovers from the pandemic, when many school communities migrated from class email chains to class WhatsApp chats to keep parents connected.

Most of the parents interviewed for this story said teachers and school staff weren’t in the groups, but they said they couldn’t confirm everyone’s identity in the chat. A spokesperson for The Department of Education said they were unable to comment for this story because the agency is not involved in chats.

The WhatsApp groups are not formally affiliated with the schools and range in size from single classrooms to entire grade levels – one for Brooklyn Technical High School serves nearly 1,500 freshmen and has over 350 parents, according to a parent in the group.

At their best, they are forums for fellow parents to share practical information about quaint school affairs: coordinating field days, chipping in for a gift for a teacher, or confirming graduation details.

But in practice, according to seven parents interviewed for this story, they can quickly become overwhelming, drowning participants in endless chatter about test scores, playground drama, rumors about teachers and sometimes things that have nothing to do with school whatsoever.

One parent described a lice outbreak in her daughter’s classroom, which sent the parent group into a tailspin as they deliberated about how to protect their kids from lice. She said her phone dinged for two hours straight with dozens of messages. Others described groups that clock over 100 messages a day.

Ironically, parents find school WhatsApp chats overwhelming for the same reasons they flocked to the app in the first place: it’s popular and makes chatting very, very easy.

‘I don't have enough mental real estate'

The main drawback about the WhatsApp groups, parents said, is how the volume and content of the messages can stress everyone out. Most parents are already inundated with communications about their children: emails from the school, emails from teachers, notifications from the school portal. And that’s all in addition to the WhatsApp messages.

For parents with older children, that anxiety crescendos during the high school and college admissions seasons, when the group chats are buzzing with exam prep talk and test scores.

Even though her daughter was in elementary school, Renee Soufer felt the onslaught of messages made her feel like there’s an “endless list of expectations” for parents.

“If you already feel you're not doing enough, and then on top of that, there are things that are going on in the school, or things that I haven't even thought of, that I should be on top of or I should be considering,” Soufer said.

Soufer said the classroom WhatsApp group, which she joined during the pandemic-era school closures, was rife with speculation on whether the school would shut down, what their kids were complaining about at school and whether they were adhering to masking or sharing masks.

As the messages piled up, so did her anxiety about them, a sentiment shared by almost every parent interviewed for this story.

“There was a lot of paranoia,” said Soufer, who eventually removed herself from the group chat, something many parents said they feel unable to do.

“There’s a great fear in stepping away from anything to do with our children,” said Nancy Colier, a parent, author and psychotherapist.

Colier said the impulsion to participate, or even just read messages, in parent WhatsApp groups is due to enormous cultural pressure to “be a part of our children’s every moment.”

“Our involvement in the small parts of our children's lives is intensifying,” Colier said. “To be in everything, and to be part of everything, and know everything about what's going on — it's having a ripple effect down the line.”

Colier hears from parents in her psychotherapy practice that these ripples manifest as real psychological issues: anxiety, mental restlessness and insomnia.

“We buried ourselves alive in things we have to do,” Colier said. “I don’t think it’s good for our children and I know that it creates an enormous amount of stress to have to be involved at such a granular level.”

Colier herself was once part of a parent group: an email chain, replete with its own relentless notifications and information about other children with no application to her own life.

She, too, left the group.

“I just wasn’t opening them,” Colier said. “I don't have enough mental real estate to know everything going on with every child or every interaction that parents have had.”

‘Parents have never been shy about filing complaints about teachers’

Discussions about teachers pervade the WhatsApp groups, parents said and passing observations about them can quickly spin out of control. Most discussions are innocuous — like asking about when homework is due or whether a teacher has finished grading an assignment.

The group chats are also used as sounding boards. Parents use them to fact-check rumors they’ve heard about teachers: whether a particular teacher is strict or assigns a lot of homework.

Still, what starts as a sounding board can soon turn into an echo chamber. One parent in Brooklyn said participants in her group chat would share negative experiences about teachers in the group and gin up support for lodging formal complaints.

“They're asking other parents if they had the same experience and then, ‘What do we do?’” she said. “And then usually a parent would say, ‘Oh, you should reach out to the assistant principal and complain.’”

But sometimes, parents said, rumors can take on a life of their own.

At Brooklyn Tech, a parent WhatsApp group chat erupted into hysteria when the school was put on “hold” without explanation and students were instructed to stay in place. Rumors began to spread immediately in the group chat as parents reported what their kids were telling them in the chat. The story soon took on a life of its own: Was it a student assailant with a knife? A streaker who jumped in the pool? Or something else entirely?

Message after message poured in. Parents admonished each other in the chat for spreading rumors without official information. When parents were speculating on whether a student had attacked a teacher, a parent admin reminded the group that the student’s parents could be among them. Then the chat — like the school itself — was locked down for several hours by parent admins, screenshots showed.

“It’s insane,” said one parent, of the group dynamic. “You have to stop at some point, you are adults. This is not helping anyone.”

In fairness to parents, it seems few people at the school understand what happened that day, according to an article about the lockdown published in the student paper, which said that most students remained unclear about why the school was put on hold. Brooklyn Tech referred inquiries to the department of education, which did not respond to emails asking for clarification about the incident.

The question of how WhatsApp should be used in schools is a global one. In the United Kingdom, two parents were arrested after they complained about their school in a parent WhatsApp group. They were held for 11 hours on suspicion of harassment after criticizing how the school was recruiting a new headteacher in a group chat.

And in Australia, school administrators complained about the online mob mentality that can fester in the groups, describing the WhatsApp parents groups as proof of “the toxic way parents treated their children’s teachers.”

Today, many schools in the UK issue guidelines for parents in using these chats. The private Menlo School near Stanford, California, offers WhatsApp guidelines for grownups with tips like “be mindful of volume” and “avoid gossip.”

Many parents in the New York area said they were given no guidance around using WhatsApp, which is perhaps why the chats can feel like a free-for-all.

Christina Collins, director of education policy at the United Federation of Teachers, said WhatsApp group chats are the latest iteration of “something that has always happened at PTA meetings and in communities in other ways.”

“Parents have never been shy about filing complaints about teachers,” Collins said. “Students have never been shy about complaining about their teachers in various venues.”

Alison Gendar, a spokeswoman for UFT, said in a statement that its staff has shared verbal guidance about best practices for WhatsApp groups but did not elaborate further and said it has not issued written guidelines. As for any complaints that go “further than the facts,” Gendar said UFT employees are entitled to due process and that there is a system in place to vet rumors.

“It's good for society and for schools for parents to be engaged with our kids' education,” Collins said.

But for many New York City parents, they’d prefer a little less engagement, at least on WhatsApp.

Do you have a WhatsApp story? Please share it with us using this form.