The Conspiracy To Keep Women Busy ™ – Part 197: School Activities
No, you haven’t missed a hundred and ninety five articles since I wrote the original post titled The Conspiracy to Keep Women Busy. In fact, this is the second article I’m writing on this topic. But, please, put your hand up if you feel like there is nowhere near one hundred and ninety seven things that are going on that keep us busy. Nobody? Yeah, I thought so.
So today, I’m choosing a random item, from the mountain of things that keep us busy, to rant about to you: School-related stuff for those of us who have kids. And I’ll tell you how I’ve coped with it. (I’ll also tell you what the photo of tulips has to do with anything).
I dare say when I was a kid (where everything was so much better than it is now, because everything was always better back then), my parents did have to deal with school-related tasks I’m not thinking of. But I’m certain, completely certain, that it was nowhere near as complicated as things are these days.
Yes, there were permission slips a few times a year. About once every few years, it involved a field trip, so it was important to get it signed and back to school in time. The school would send reminders about annual fees, or photo days. There were, indeed, things to keep track of.
On the other hand, neither of my parents, nor any of my friends’ parents, ever came to the school to help chaperone a field trip. None of them were folding up pieces of paper to put into folders, or cutting up paper stars to help with a school craft activity. They weren’t baking cupcakes for Halloween, or shopping for items to contribute to the classroom cooking project. They weren’t doing crazy stuff with my hair for crazy hair days or desperately searching the house for a purple t-shirt because it was purple t-shirt day at school.
What the heck happened in between? Let me tell you – someone decided women just weren’t busy enough.
Can I prove to you that that’s what actually occurred? Not at all. In fact, I’m totally inventing this. But I’m going to tell you about it, anyway. Here’s how I think the reasoning went.
These women just aren’t busy and exhausted enough. Sure, they’re struggling, but some of them still have enough energy and brain space to notice that they don’t have a lot of time for themselves. Clearly, we need to get them even more busy and tired, so that they can’t possibly think beyond the next minute of their day. What shall we do? Ha, I have it! We’ll invent more kid-related activities for them to take part in. Nobody can possibly argue that enrichment activities for kids is something you can ever say no to.
School just isn’t fun enough for the kids. Look at what’s happening – they only have field trips a few times during their entire school life. They should have one every month or two. What, you’re telling me it’s not truly possible to manage thirty kids in a public place until they get a little older? No, it’s not, but that’s fine. We’ll convince the parents that it’s on them to take a whole day to join us and help with the supervision. Multiple times each year. For each of their kids.
The list goes on. Putting worksheets into their homework folders? That’s so boring. Why should a kid have to do that for themselves? We need more adults to put this task on. And just wearing clothes to school, that’s boring. Let’s invent special days with special things for kids to wear. if a kid isn’t wearing the right color of t-shirt or sporting a crazy enough level of hair, why, they might feel left out, so the moms will surely do their bit.
The craft activities the kids are doing? Not fun enough. We want them to have their snowflakes ready-made by their parents, so they can add pretty sparkles to them and stick them on a fancy colored background. Waiting a year or two to do such an activity, so the kids can handle scissors more confidently, and then cutting out snowflakes – that would just be waiting too long.
Halloween parties? It’s too much to expect that the students have a classroom activity where they prepare all the snacks. Given the work involved in food preparation, it might result in the kids only having one or two snacks to choose from. Instead, we’ll have ten different items the parents bring in, just so that the kids can continue in their belief that food appears magically in front of them with no effort at all.
Oh, and classroom cooking activities where you need to buy a stack of ingredients and bring them to the school? Of course, we know that the most efficient way to do this would be to increase any fees from the school by a few dollars per family, and have a school staff member go shopping. Hey, if you’re hung up on field trips, you could even turn this into a field trip by taking the students to the grocery store and having them learn and practice how grocery shopping is done.
But no, let’s make this as complicated at the family level as we can.
Let’s create a list of supplies, and demand every family go to the list to sign up for a few items. Those items then need to be added to the family’s grocery shopping list, be bought in time for the activity, and someone needs to remember to bring them to the school. That person will also need to figure out where at the school to drop the items off, because – we won’t tell them where! All of this, multiplied by every family in the classroom. And all of this, performed multiple times a year. After all, we talk about death by a thousand cuts, not just one or two.
The parents may catch on to all this after a while, but most likely it will be towards the end of their kids’ schooling. By which time we’ll have a fresh batch of parents coming through the lower grades, to introduce these principles to.
Wait, you say, there’s a problem with all that reasoning. Surely the dads will also feel this burden. No, not so much.
You see, the men know they are a hundred percent busy, and that they can’t do more. So, they won’t do more. They know that it’s not reasonable. But the women – they didn’t get that memo. They don’t know that saying no to something is permitted.
And anyway, the women are two hundred percent busy. Yes, that’s more than a hundred percent. Since they’ve already accepted that it’s normal to be doing more than you reasonably can, this won’t trigger any kind of threshold for them that will tell them it’s too much. It will just feel like more of what they’re already coping with. And it’s for their kids, so they won’t dare to say no in favor of more time for themselves, for fear of looking selfish.
To be sure, there are a few brave dads who will sign up for field trips. They will be outnumbered by all the moms, feel completely out of place, and never dare to attempt such a thing again.
Was any teacher involved in the creation of such exorbitant expectations? I’m thinking not. They’re crazy busy too. Somebody hypnotized them as well as the parents.
I admit, there are parents who are incredibly good at volunteering at school and helping to make it a wonderful place. I’m super-grateful for these parents. One of my kids, when at a new school, or new anything, will generally freeze up and not speak to anyone for the first month. But the last two times she’s been at a new school, I noticed her happily talking away to a new adult in the first week – in each case, a volunteer parent! These are wonderful people. But I’m not one of them. I do have some abilities relevant to life on this planet. I can host play dates of limited size – the kind where the kids can come over at a moment’s notice, have access to the pantry as hunger strikes, and direct their own activities. I can stare at numbers and analyze them. I can hold a deep philosophical conversation for quite some time. But most of these school-related items – give me enough of them and I need to go back to bed for the day. Which means that for me, even on days when I technically have time for such tasks, I simply may not have the energy. What to do?
After all that doom and gloom, I would like to give you some good news. Drumroll, please…
The sky will not fall if some of those activities do not happen! Really.
I have lived through a week where there weren’t enough volunteers for the Friday folders. The folders did not come home with the students that weekend. Nobody died. I have seen a field trip get canceled due to a lack of chaperones. Everyone survived.
So what did I do to cope with all these tasks? I opted out. I stopped volunteering. I let my kids search for their own purple t-shirts on purple t-shirt day. And I allowed my kids to remember those special days on their own – neither I nor my calendar keep track of those. (Oh, and the tulips you see at the top of this post are a random photo I took when, instead of volunteering at school, I took an inordinate length of time coming back from school drop-off because I was taking photos.)
It can feel difficult to just – opt out. The school will tell you they need those items, those tasks, those kids wearing whatever the theme of that day is, those – whatever. They don’t. It’s a bit like an incident with our preschool teacher. A student came up to her, saying, “I need a cupcake!”
The teacher corrected the student by saying “No, you want a cupcake, you don’t need it”. The teacher was very sympathetic about it. She explained to us, “Hey, I often feel I need a cupcake when I actually don’t”. Speaking for myself, it can go even further. When I was having blood sugar problems, and would get hit with sugar cravings, things would really go haywire if I gave in those cravings. So at that point, it wasn’t even that I didn’t need a cupcake – I really needed to not have it.
That’s how it can go for a lot of things.
A school might think that they need to get parental support for an activity, when in fact, for everyone’s sanity, what they might actually need is a reality check. They might need to pull back on how many activities and tasks get scheduled in the first place.
These school tasks do indeed result in more fun activities for our kids. But are they worth our sanity? Are they worth the lesson my daughter will absorb that women have to spend their lives exhausted? No.
Therefore – when you view the list of tasks that the school has sent you, you don’t have to immediately grab your calendar and spend a whole day recording what’s happening that year. (Yes, in the past I’ve literally had it take that long. That’s how busy that school was trying to keep me). And when you view all that school communication, just because there are X tasks on the list and Y students in the class, you are not supposed to suddenly start believing that you yourself need to sign up for the number of tasks that equals X divided by Y.
If everyone who feels the need to opt out, opts out – what would happen? There would be fewer interesting activities at school, but it would settle down to a number that everyone combined can handle.
Are you worried people will think badly of you for not doing these tasks? Saying no can indeed be difficult, which is why I will create another post specifically on that topic. It’s a pity that we live in a world where saying no can be difficult, but it’s a much-needed skill. (While you work on that skill, here is a stop-gap method for dealing with the pressure. If you feel you must explain your non-participation – the explanation is that you’re dealing with a lot of crises right now. No need to explain that the crises are the volunteer tasks themselves doing a number on your sanity).
Do what makes sense for you. It may mean a few tasks, it may mean none. When I had a job that gave me paid volunteer days and included our school as a permitted organization for such volunteering – that year I helped with some field trips. But was I willing to use up my scarce vacation days for field trips? I was not. If you have chronic illness or are very introverted, guess what? It might always severely restrict your level of participation. That’s how it goes sometimes. And if your school’s activities are predicated on the assumption that every family has a stay-at-home mom plus a housekeeper and personal assistant, that school might desperately need multitudes of families opting out of volunteering so that they can figure out a different plan. If those schools set up such volunteering as a requirement, they might desperately need losing potential enrollments, until they figure out a different plan. They may not want to figure that out, but really, they need to.
Think about what actually makes sense for you to do, and know that the world will keep spinning.
