If you've been anywhere near the internet in the last month, you've probably run into Oreo Gate.

Quick version, if you missed it: someone posted a dramatic reading of screenshots from a school group chat. A mother asks the other parents to stop packing Oreos because her daughter saw one at lunch and came home upset that she isn't allowed to have them. The other parents assume there's an allergy. There isn't, it's just a house rule. It escalates.

The teacher gets involved. Lunchbox inspections happen. Somebody sends their kid in with double-stuffed Oreos out of spite. The children respond by inventing a racing game where the prize is an Oreo, thereby routing around an Oreo ban entirely.

It ran to sixteen instalments. Jennifer Garner weighed in. The Wall Street Journal covered it.

People are still arguing about whether the whole thing was staged, and honestly I don't think it matters. It went that viral because every parent who saw it recognised it instantly.

Nothing that entertaining has ever happened to me. What I get is quieter and, I think, more corrosive.

I'm on the board of our school's parent-teacher organization, which means I'm in the WhatsApp group for every grade. I sit in chats for grades where I have no child.

The pattern is the same everywhere. Parents asking what exactly is going to be on the test. Complaining they can't find out from the teacher. Asking a question that was answered four messages up if anybody had scrolled. You can feel the frustration building in the people who've read it all twice.

Sometimes, I sit there thinking: why are you this involved at this level?

In our state, we have state testing - the Milestones. Kids take them in spring, results land around September. My older one is in eighth grade now and my younger one is in fifth, so we've been doing this a while.

When they first started taking them in third grade, I looked at the results. Since then I've stopped. Completely. I don't know when they come out, I don't know how to find them, and I've concluded they don't matter.

But every September, somebody in one of those chats asks. Where do you find the results? How do you interpret them? And I think: oh God. Should I be looking at the results?

I have a considered position I arrived at over five years ago, and it takes one message from a stranger to make me wonder whether I've been quietly failing at something.

I don't go and look. But I feel it.

There are the parents who are on top of everything and say so. They know there's a quiz Thursday and a project due the following Tuesday, they've written it down, and they're not embarrassed about it. Fine. At least it's honest.

There are the parents who are completely hands off. Also fine. Also honest.

Lastly, there's the middle group - the ones who say they don't really keep track, aren't fussed, don't get involved but have several tutors that nobody knows about. None of these is wrong, exactly. Some kids genuinely need more hand-holding than others and you'd have to know the child to judge it.

But the chat doesn't show you any of that. It shows you a stream of other people appearing to be on top of things you weren't thinking about, and it makes a quiet argument that you're behind.

If keeping up with your kid's schoolwork has become a stressful thing that bleeds into your day, that's worth questioning.

It shouldn't be a full-time job. You should not be maintaining a calendar of another person's assignments while also doing your own actual work and running your own actual life. If it's reached that point, something has gone wrong, and it's probably not your kid's fault.

Here's where it ends up: you become your child's personal assistant.

You hold the calendar, track the deadlines. You know which day the uniform is needed and when the project is due and what's on the test Thursday.

A kid with a personal assistant never experiences a natural consequence which means they never learn to manage any of it, because nothing has ever required them to.

My eighth grader plays trumpet in the middle school band. They're allowed to leave instruments at school, no rules about it. You can bring it home when you need it, leave it when you don't. So it's on him to know when he needs it.

A few weeks ago he had a private lesson scheduled over the weekend. I reminded him three times to bring the trumpet home. He wrote it on his hand and yet he still forgot.

I didn't cancel the lesson. He still attended the lesson, where he spent the time doing music theory without an instrument, because that is what happens when you leave your trumpet at school. Natural consequences.

I want to be honest,  I over-helped in that story. Most of the time I don't, and I probably shouldn't have then. But the reminders aren't the point. The point is what happened after he forgot anyway.

A friend of mine has a son on a soccer team. The coach emailed all kids and parentsto bring their uniform to a particular practice.

The boy didn't read it, or read it and forgot. His mother got the email and didn't read it either.

He turned up to practice as the only kid without a uniform and he was furious with her. You didn't tell me and she felt terrible about it. But he's twelve. Not five..

That message was his to read. The embarrassment of standing there as the only one out of uniform is exactly the thing that teaches him to check his messages, and it will teach him far more efficiently than his mother ever could.

She took the blame for something that was his to carry, and in doing so she took the lesson away from him too.

It's a tiny thing. It genuinely doesn't matter on its own. But these add up, and a twelve-year-old who never has to track anything becomes a seventeen-year-old who can't.

None of this applies uniformly.

Some kids need you in the details, and you'll know if yours is one of them. If your child genuinely can't hold a schedule, or the school isn't set up for the way they learn, you stay involved for as long as it takes. That's the job.

The question isn't whether you're involved. It's whether the amount you're doing is what your particular kid needs or whether some of it is a group chat making you feel like everyone else is doing more.

Those two feel identical from the inside, which is precisely the problem.

I'm not going to tell you to leave the chats. It's how the school communicates, and half of it is genuinely useful information about school events or when the bus is late.

But I'd say this: the next time a message in there makes you feel like you're missing something, sit with it for a minute before you act on it.

Mostly, because there's a decent chance you weren't missing anything at all. There's a decent chance you had a perfectly reasonable position on it and somebody's question just made you forget you had it.

That's what these things do. They don't give you information. They give you a problem you didn't have, and then you go looking for the solution.

See you next week,
Lakshmi 💛

P.S. Next time your kid forgets something, try doing nothing. Just let the thing happen. It is genuinely much harder than fixing it, and it works considerably better.