Schools Call Mothers First: What the New Study Shows

The school's number flashes on the screen. A kid scraped a knee at recess, or spiked a fever after lunch. The school secretary picks up her own phone and dials. Which parent does she call first? A study published on September 10, 2026 on The Conversation just put a number on something many mothers already suspected without proof: in most cases, it's her. Even when the father is listed, in writing, as the more available parent that day.

This isn't an isolated anecdote. It's a documented, measured pattern — and it lines up with another study published months earlier in France, on how much time fathers actually spend alone with their children. Put the two together, and they tell the same story: twenty years of visible progress on fatherhood, and an institutional reflex that hasn't moved an inch.

A two-year study, a number that doesn't budge

Three economists — Laura K. Gee, Kristy Buzard, and Olga Stoddard — ran the field experiment during the summer of 2022, contacting more than 80,000 school principals across the United States. The design is simple. A fictional email, signed by a family with a mother and a father, asks to enroll a child. Both parents leave a phone number. The researchers varied the names, the wording, and crucially, which parent was described as more available that particular day. Then they tracked who the school called back first.

The result: among principals who called someone back, 60% contacted the mother first, against 40% for the father. Overall, mothers were about 1.4 times more likely to get that first phone call. And the bias held even when the email explicitly stated the father was more reachable that day. The school called the mother anyway — against the very information it had just received.

The study is American: American schools, an American sample. But nothing suggests the reflex stops at the border. Front offices, town halls, sports clubs, summer camps often run on the same unspoken assumption: pick one reference parent, and by default, that's her.

One phone call doesn't look like much

A single call from the nurse's office, taken in isolation, is nothing. The problem is what piles up over a full school year. The cafeteria registration in August. The permission slip for the museum trip in October. The reminder from the school doctor about the mandatory checkup. The gym teacher's message about the fall sports camp. The soccer club's email that changed practice time on alternating Wednesdays. Each contact, alone, takes two minutes. Stacked across ten months, they form a continuous stream of information to receive, sort, forward, and remember — the raw material of mental load.

It isn't neutral for what comes next, either. Whoever the school calls becomes, almost automatically, the one who knows the parent-teacher conference is Thursday night, that the vaccination record needs updating before December, that the older kid's internship has to be lined up before February break. The information lands with her first. She then has to decide whether to forward it, hold onto it, or just handle it alone — and handling it alone usually wins, simply because there's no time left to organize the forwarding.

The father paradox

A separate study, published in November 2025 by DREES, the French national statistics agency for health and social affairs, sheds light on this from another angle. Over twenty years, between 2002 and 2021, fathers do spend more time with young children — two and a half hours more per week than two decades ago. But nearly all of that gain sits in time spent alongside the mother, not instead of her: three hours and forty-five minutes more, specifically, in tandem. Time spent alone with the child actually dropped by thirty minutes over the same period.

In practice: mothers spend an average of 23 hours a week alone with children under 6. Fathers, about 5 hours and 45 minutes — four times less. And 45% of children under 6 are, in a typical week, never cared for alone by their father at all.

The father is there. He plays, drops the kids off, helps with Tuesday night homework. But he's rarely the solo adult in charge — the one who handles the unexpected, makes the call without checking in first, picks up the phone. And that is exactly the role a school triggers when it dials at 3pm on a Tuesday. It's a role that 700,000 couples with at least one child under 6 — 22% of French families — still split very unevenly, according to DREES: in half of these households, parenting tasks fall mainly on the mother, against only 10% where they fall mainly on the father.

That solo availability carries a direct cost in free time. Still per DREES, when both parents work full-time, the mother spends on average one hour more per day with the children than the father does. The result: she has 3 hours and 10 minutes less per week for anything that isn't work or childcare — 20% less free time, full stop.

Why the reflex persists

Nobody at a school front desk consciously decides to sideline fathers. The bias is quieter than that. It rests on an unspoken assumption: the mother is the reference contact, the one who'll answer fast and know what to do with the information. That assumption is built on accumulated experience. If, statistically, she's answered the last ten calls, the pattern hardens into a reflex that feeds itself: the more she's called, the more she becomes the reference parent; the more she's the reference parent, the more she keeps getting called.

This mechanism catches even couples who describe their split as balanced. DREES identifies a quarter of families where childcare is shared evenly between both parents — often the most highly educated couples, the ones who have explicitly negotiated the division of labor. Even in those households, the school's first call has every chance of landing on the same phone it always does.

"But the form only has room for one name"

One objection comes up often: intake forms genuinely only ask for a single priority contact, so isn't this just an artifact of bad form design? Partly, yes — and that's worth fixing on its own. But the study controlled for exactly that. Both parents' numbers were provided, side by side, with no hierarchy implied by the email itself. The school still had to choose, on its own, who to call first. When there's no form forcing the choice, the reflex shows up anyway. That's the part worth sitting with: even a neutral starting point doesn't produce a neutral outcome.

What actually changes in a household

A couple can't rewrite a school's calling protocol. But there are three things worth changing this fall.

First, the "primary contact" field on the enrollment form. Most forms only ask for one priority number. If the same name always goes there, the school has no reason to change habits. Listing both parents as equal contacts, or alternating who goes first each year, takes five minutes in September — and changes who picks up in March.

Second, forward the information received instead of quietly handling it alone. A call from the nurse, a note from the teacher, an email from the cafeteria: whoever receives it can choose to share it right away, not just the decision that follows two days later. That's where the real difference sits — being informed at the same time as your partner, not informed after the fact about a choice already made.

Third, formalize who handles what on a standing basis, instead of leaving it to whoever answers the phone that particular day. A shared list or a common planning tool does exactly that — it puts the split in writing so it stops depending on the luck of an incoming call. This is what Mental Loadless is built for: turning a scattered stream of information — schools, doctors, activities — into tasks both parents can see, instead of information stored in one person's head. On this exact pattern, our piece on the default parent breaks down how the "who gets contacted" habit gets set in the first place, and our guide to back-to-school mental load covers other concrete fixes for the fall term.

What this number actually says

The American study doesn't prove French schools behave identically. But it documents a mechanism that goes well beyond the classroom: institutions reach out to whichever parent they perceive as most available, and that perception is built almost entirely on who answered last time. Paired with French data on parental time, it draws the same line: fathers are more present than they were twenty years ago, but rarely alone at the wheel. And as long as that's true, the phone will keep ringing on the same side of the bed.