Back-to-school season is hectic for parents and caregivers and one place that’s apparent is the endless number of emails related to their kids that are hitting their inboxes. They can be great for keeping us informed about school, extracurricular activities and everything else going on in our children’s lives, but those full inboxes can also be overwhelming.
A new survey of over 2-thousand parents and caregivers with school-age kids reveals how they feel about their overflowing personal inboxes.
- The average parent gets about four emails a day related to their kids, their school, and activities, which adds up to over 80 emails a month.
- So it’s not surprising that the average parent has more than 2-thousand unread emails in their inbox at any given time. Younger parents (those ages 20 to 34) have even more - an average of 28-hundred.
- All those emails have 52% feeling overwhelmed by their personal email inbox and 48% wishing they could have an “out of office” on their personal inboxes.
- Nearly a third (29%) feel their personal email is even more stressful than their work email.
- A third of parents agree that email can interfere with quality family time.
- But just because there’s so much communication doesn’t mean things don’t slip through the cracks, as 62% have missed an important event, information or detail in their email inbox.
- When that happens, 71% feel like bad parents.
- More than half (56%) of parents and caregivers say they get too many emails and 22% can’t ever find the email they’re looking for.
- About half (49%) of those polled feel their personal email adds to their mental load as a parent.
Source: Scary Mommy