Reply to Did Covid disrupt the parent volunteer pipeline

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]It's dual employment. Severe shortage of SAHPs. [/quote]

Also, the funny thing is, when there were more SAHPs, there were less of these extra school activities. Back in the day, you maybe had one field trip and one class party per year. I'd prefer going back to that myself. I don't think fairs, gardens, etc. are worth the trouble. I'd rather schools just focus on in class learning.

I'm older, but I think the younger generation of parents is onto something. [/quote]

Agree. Speaking for our public schools, they hardly teach some of the fundamentals like spelling and grammar. I would rather they focus more on learning than have these extra activities. [/quote]

My mom was a SAHM back in the 80s and she spent zero time at the school volunteering. There weren’t all these extras at the time demanding her time. The SAHMs back then didn’t create a bunch of make work jobs for themselves so they could hang out at school all day. I’m not sure exactly when the shift happened but someone at some point decided kids needed a spirit week with themed days, breakfasts for the teachers and teacher appreciation week with daily activities (provided for by volunteers), fun fests/fall fests/spring whatever, over the top classroom parties with snacks and crafts parents need to figure out, 100 day parties, dress like a book character, etc. When and why did schools decide all of this was necessary? [/quote]

I also wonder why and when this shift happened. Here are my theories right now:

1) A defensive overreaction to the accusation that having two working parents means parents don't care about kids or schools and aren't "involved." To counteract this working parents got ultra involved and this led to a bunch of new "obligations" that sahms didn't even use to do. Evidence: all the highly involve parents on the frankly over-active PTA at my kid's school are working parents and many work in highly demanding jobs. Why would people with demanding busy jobs take all this on. Well maybe they are trying to prove to the community that having those jobs doesn't negatively impact their kids (for the record it never occurred to me that it did).

2) Related -- as more women decided to work after having kids sahms got defensive and went into overdrive to justify being sahms. Basically the inverse of #1. A lot of people talk about how sahms are lazy or just sponging off their husbands (to be clear I do not think this) so being super active at school and organizing a bunch of stuff in a very visible way is a way to counteract that criticism.

I also think it's possible it's both #1 and #2 and that these phenomenon spur one another on.

3) Teacher and admin burnout. It used to be that some teachers would organize some (of the far fewer and smaller) community events at a school. That's still true in places but I think far less than it used to be. There is so much administrative burden on teachers these days (so many forms and assessments and reports and IEPs and professional development obligations etc.) that most teachers truly do not have the time or energy to do something like this even if it's once a year. And also because of #1 and #2 parents are more overzealous than they used to be and teachers get tired of dealing with these intense parents who always want more more more. So they opt out altogether and this shifts more of the burden onto parents who are ill-equipped to handle it.

Those are my theories anyway. It's the only way I can explain why parents are now expected to volunteer like 10x more than they used to while also working more than they used to.[/quote]

I'll throw one more onto this list (which I think is good!): social media. Not only do you have 1 & 2 putting pressure on parents, but now you have the FOMO of other people posting pictures about it and you feeling like you too need to post those pictures. College friend's kid got to have X party at school in another state? We should do that here! Pinterest showed you crazy fantastic decorations for Y social event? Got to copy those and post them on Instagram! I think the pressures would exist without social media, but social media makes it so much worse.[/quote]

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