Welcome Back To School... & Push Notification Hell
As my kids would say, I want to yeet my phone against the wall.
“Did you see the message in the TeamyTime* app about the fall schedule?” My spouse asks as we finally sit down, having managed to wrangle our four kids to bed long past summer sunset. I sigh because I’m not sure if I saw the TeamyTime notification — perhaps I did, amidst a dozen other dings and buzzes from the various apps and platforms used to manage children’s activities and education these days.
PowerSchools, Class Dojo, SeeSaw, TeamSnap, some app that manages our lunch accounts (or claims to, but actually sucks) — how many apps can one community use? A lot, apparently, and from talking to friends I know this is the case across the country. While our Boomer parents love to tell us to “just put our phones down and be present,” every facet of modern parenting is driven by push alerts and group chats. We can’t, mom.
I am not one to shy away from technology. In fact, I think tech has the potential to make our lives easier. But it also has the potential to make our lives more chaotic to the point where I want to, as my kids say, yeet my phone against the wall.
While summer is stressful in a lot of ways, I find that I breathe easier without constant pinging about my children all day long. There are a few sports apps that pop up on our lock screen during the break, but generally the pace of activities cools off a bit when temperatures rise. Once late summer hits, though, here come the newsletters, alerts, and group chats again. I want to be a part of my child's education, but has technology taken this too far?
Being able to be involved in my kids’ schooling is a blessing in many ways. I love that our teachers are approachable and proactive so that we can address small issues before they become big ones. I love that these apps allow teachers to talk to all parents in our multilingual school. I love seeing photos from candid moments during the hours my kids aren’t with me.
I also see how the ability to ping a teacher about a small question at any time can be alluring, and my friends say the same… maybe a little too alluring. “Maybe I would just wait until open house to ask, but if I can just send a quick message when the thought pops into my head? Why not?” One friend laments to me. She says the apps make it easier to “helicopter parent,” even though that’s not generally her nature.
I get it. And if we as parents feel this way, I can’t imagine the stress teachers and coaches feel to upload little updates and photos each day (even if they make me smile). Already overworked and underpaid, we’ve added the task of being social media managers to the task of teaching. But it seems pretty these apps are here to stay.
I think part of the reason the apps bother me so much is that it’s hard to ascertain which alert might be about sickness or behavior issues — and which is about yet another spirit week.
Other parents, totally overwhelmed by all of the platforms they need to monitor, tell me they’ve entirely checked out and turned off all alerts. Several recent studies have found that the more our phones ping us, the less we notice — perhaps even negating the usefulness of the apps altogether. It has a name (digital fatigue) and I’ve found a few small ways to manage it. I took some time to go through my phone and toggle specific notifications on or off, which allows me to see important messages while filtering out general mass communication. My phone now sends me a notification summary three times a day that I generally find helpful.
These little steps have eased the overwhelm just a bit, though they haven’t lessened my gnawing worry that I might miss something important. In a world where every ding, vibration, or banner notification could be about something critical, that’s trickier to do. So as we head back to school this fall and once again begin to curate what applications are allowed to populate our lockscreens, I take comfort in the fact that I am not the only parent (or teacher) who sometimes wants to turn on a permanent DND and wander off into the forest. And for the love of God, if there’s a real emergency, just call me on the phone.
*TeamyTime is a made-up name that represents every app parents have ever been forced to download, in all of their ad-laden, glitchy glory.
Meg St-Esprit, M. Ed., is a journalist and essayist based in Pittsburgh, PA. She’s a mom to four kids via adoption as well as a twin mom. She loves to write about parenting, education, trends, and the general hilarity of raising little people.
