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. <\/p>
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.<\/p>
“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<\/a>. “If they want to give him paracetamol, they call me. If he has injured himself they call me.”<\/p> 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.”<\/p>