There is a particular way a phone buzzes at 10.40 on a weekday. You’re halfway through something, a meeting or a shift or a supermarket queue, and the screen shows the name of your child’s school. You already know what it is. A temperature, a bit pale, could someone come and collect her. You say yes before you’ve worked out how.

By mid-October most classrooms have passed round every cold going. Illness is the most common reason children in England miss school, just over half of all absence according to the Department for Education, so the call comes often, and usually to the same phone.

The call is the middle of it

The phone call looks like the job, but the work started at 7am, with a hand on a forehead and the question of whether she’s ill enough to stay off. The sociologist Allison Daminger calls this anticipating and monitoring: spotting that something is coming, then keeping an eye on it.

After the call comes the arithmetic. Whose job can bend today, who has the meeting that can’t move. An email to the boss, a day of annual leave or an unpaid one, and then the rest of the week to rearrange around whoever stays home tomorrow.

When a school needs a parent, it calls Mum

In a study published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics in 2025, researchers emailed around 80,000 US school principals with a general enquiry, posing as two-parent families. They gave both parents’ numbers and asked for a call back without saying who to ring. Schools contacted the mother 1.4 times as often as the father. A 2023 release from Brigham Young University, describing an earlier version of the study, reported that even when the father had sent the email and named himself as the one to call, mothers were still rung first 12% of the time.

In a 2022 KFF survey of US working parents, 56% of mothers said they usually look after a sick child who can’t go to school, against 19% of fathers. Fathers were more likely to say it was shared equally (33%, against 24% of mothers). In the UK, Deloitte and YouGov found working mothers were almost twice as likely as fathers to use annual leave for caring, 33% against 18%.

None of that says anyone is unwilling. It describes a default nobody really chose: the school has a habit, the household has a habit, and each quietly props up the other. Single-parent homes, two-mum homes and grandparents on the school run all have their own version.

Being the one they ring

If you’re the partner who wants to share this, ask to be the first contact, and mean it. Tell the school, the after-school club and the childminder, then be the one who picks up. Olga Stoddard, one of the study’s authors, has said that telling schools the father is the point of contact does push more of the calls his way, “but there’s a ceiling.”

The rest is getting the chain out of one head before 10.40. On a Youtine family calendar you both look at, it can already say who’s covering Tuesday if anyone wakes up poorly, because you agreed it at the weekend, so the 7am question has an answer before anyone has to ask it. When a day does fall apart, the pieces that need moving (the pickup, the swimming lesson, the work call that needs swapping) become shared tasks rather than a list only one of you is carrying. A quick check-in once she’s been collected means the other parent isn’t left wondering all afternoon.

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