The Day's Most Divisive Topic: Why Do You Only Email the Moms?

By Dustin Rowles | Miscellaneous | July 15, 2022 |

By Dustin Rowles | Miscellaneous | July 15, 2022 |

The tweet below went viral this week and provoked a lot of discussions.

Been running into dads of my 3yo’s classmates and asking for their emails for his birthday party and so far 3 out of 3 dads have proceeded to give me their wives’ emails instead. This is now a social experiment.

— Sonya Bonczek (@SonyaBonczek) July 12, 2022

My expectation before looking at all the replies would be that there’d be a lot of fathers dispelling this perceived trend, and a lot of mothers suggesting this trend tracked because men, ugh. There was some of that in the replies, but overwhelmingly, I saw fathers mostly defending the dads spoken about above. They say that they are too absent-minded to keep up with playdates, that their wives are in charge of the calendars, and that mothers are better at this sort of thing! What?

On a personal level, I wanted to dispel this trend completely, because in my experience — as the parent who works from home — usually either I receive the emails (or texts), or both my wife and I are addressed. How dare it be suggested that all dads are out of the loop on their children’s social lives! I operate a very efficient calendar (largely made up of alarms I set to remind myself of impending engagements, and most of the time I remember why I set those alarms!)

But then I thought about it more and realized that while I do arrange a lot of the birthday parties and playdates, with some exceptions — if I’m personally good friends with the fathers — I almost always text or email the mothers of my children’s friends. Huh. Why? I don’t know. It’s just how it ends up happening. Am I part of the problem?

As for why women only ask for the email addresses or phone numbers of other moms? Girls5Eva has an answer for that.

Girls5Eva did an INCREDIBLE take on this exact topic: pic.twitter.com/xl7nkKodiq

— Joe Muto (@JoeMuto) July 13, 2022