The All-School Email About Waffle

Newsletter 2023-05-05

My kids think I don’t know what they’re up to at school. I wish that were actually the case. I’d prefer to remain blissfully unaware of what happens when they’re out of my direct line of sight. Instead, I get a never-ending stream of emails and in-app messages about what’s going on in their classrooms. My phone is constantly blowing up with updates about their grades, special assignments, field trips, and extracurricular activities. I receive so many urgent bulletins that I give up and tune them all out. Because the school tells me everything, I’m aware of nothing. That’s the price of raising kids in the information age. Time to opt out of all the alerts for how I’m failing as a parent.

This week, though, I got one email that was unusual enough for me to actually read it. It was about my seven-year-old, Waffle. It came not from her homeroom teacher, but from her principal. And it went out not just to my wife and me, but to the entire school. It was a very public message that changed everything I thought I knew about my youngest child.