The 10 Rudest Things You Can Do In A Parents Group Chat

If you have a school-age child, you’ve likely been added to several parents group chats — for their class at school as well as soccer, gymnastics or whichever activities your child participates in.

On the one hand, a group chat can be extremely useful for getting time-sensitive information, like the location of a game or confirmation that tomorrow is pajama day. At its best, it can be a space for parents helping parents.

But all technological advances have their downsides. There are conversations that go off track, complaints, abuses of “reply all,” pettiness and negativity, as well as the sheer time suck of the whole endeavor.

Occasionally, something salacious occurs. When I mentioned that I was working on this story, a colleague told me that he’d heard about an X-rated message that accidentally got sent in a parents group chat — and was quickly deleted!

There’s also the opportunity for public embarrassment on a large scale. Megann, a mom in Los Angeles, told HuffPost that in a big group chat she belongs to, another mom once accidentally hit “send” on a voice memo in which she could be heard asking her husband repeatedly: “Did you just fart?… Oh, my God, did you just fart?”

But more common is the experience of another colleague of mine, who told me that one day when she stepped away from her phone for a half-hour meeting, she returned to find that she had missed 154 texts — a number that’s even more impressive when you learn that there were only 17 people in the chat.

There’s a line between being helpful and being too much. Some chats clearly cross it, while others just approach it — perhaps making you wonder how rude it would be to simply remove yourself from the group.

There are plenty of ways to commit a faux pas in