The authorities have no reason to be involved. It's 20 minutes, and children can take care of themselves.

At least 99.9% of my voicemails are a couple second long robocalls, but in the rare event of it being a genuine phone call, I get the google transcription of someone saying 'please call me back' on my watch and then I do so. Just because I'm willing to glance at notifications on my watch of incoming voicemails for an instant, doesn't mean I'm willing to talk to hundreds of robocallers per month. Its just too expensive.

Voice phone calls are dead, kid discussion would usually be handled via text or email. I don't really get phone calls about my kids. I believe the more corporate-type environments enjoy the written documentation provided by text/email as opposed to unrecorded undocumented phone call.

The era of always-on low-fi audio connections was very short. Just 30 years ago, parents certainly had no electronic tether and had a home phone number, maybe with an answering machine in later years. And now that technology is completely dead and unusable.

> Voice phone calls are dead

I am amused by this blanket assertion. It really depends on the age/type of people involved and the kinds of interactions they are involved in. I am 50 years old and work in both software consulting and run a tugboat company. I had to take over the tugboat company two years ago due to a death in the family. For 30 years prior to that, I was working almost exclusively in software. During the last couple of years before taking over the tugboat business, I had my phone set to do-not-disturb almost all of the time. In the tugboat business, that does not work at all.

For dealing with software people in purely technical matters, text/Slack/Teams is fine. I respect the needs of others who don't like real-time conversations. For doing business deals in software, I often end up having phone calls with decision makers.

For the tugboat industry, it is too fast paced and too much money is on the line in quick deals to screen phone calls.

Don't assume that everyone works the same way.

My kid is in CA, I am selling a house in AZ, and my wife is buying a house in GA. Most of my friends are out of state. Voice has immense emotional bandwidth advantages over any form of text. It definitely helps everyone in the stress pool maintain levity. I do prefer all business to be conducted through text formats (email preferred) though.

In the case in the GP, maybe a message would have worked too but I don't see the problem with calling.

That said, I get a lot of spam calls on my Fi phone but I simply don't answer if I don't recognize the number. Fi asks me if the number was spam and it's simple to give a brief scan of the transcript if there is one and tell it yes or no.

Presumably, had silenced call be the social default, the parents would have added your phone number into their contact list on the first day of school, sort of like how you have to add someone on a chat app to talk to them.

Parents do not, as a matter of course, have my cell phone number. It's fine for a few families to have it (because e.g. I had to call them), but if every parent in the program was able to message me at any time of day, I think I'd have a problem.

Now, there are other ways this could work. My company has a "director of client services"—let's call her "Anna"—and all parents have Anna's number. So I suppose I could have called Anna, and Anna could have called the parents, and then Anna could have called me back to relay what the parents said. It just would have taken longer.

Of course, Anna is occasionally sick / on vacation / otherwise unavailable, in which case there's a second person—let's call her "Vivian"—who I can reach out to in an emergency. We're an after-school program, so we're not set up to have a centralized office phone, but I guess parents could add Vivian to their contacts as well.

But I'm happy I was able to just call the parents.

If someone is looking after my child, I have their number. I block calls from unknown numbers adn and some prefixes, and silence calls from numbers not in my contacts. This is pretty normal I think (because of spam).

I've only once had the problem that someone from the school used their personal mobile to call me and didn't get through, but I was already calling to let them know I'd be late.

There's no reason for parents to be able to contact you socially unless you invite it, but surely you should contact them from a school/shared number?

I'm suggesting this not for the sake of others, but for your sake. Given that people will block unknown numbers, I would think using a known number makes your life easier.

It seems odd to me than an after-school program has no set way for parents to contact the program without going through a relay-style process. I agree that the solution shouldn't be "give out your personal phone number," but it also shouldn't be "rely on a person that's not at the program to relay calls to you."

Put another way, how would a parent contact the program in an emergency? They'd likely (as you illustrated) go through an intermediary that may or may not be there. That seems less than ideal, and certainly wouldn't be something that I'd be happy about if my child were in the program.

Y'know, that's a great point. I actually don't know how things look from the parent's side--I can tell you for sure they don't have my number, but "Anna"'s number must be a business phone, as I know parents always have a number they can call.

Or they would have seen that there was an actual message left and called back.

That's how I tell the scammers from actual calls 95% of the time - the scammers never leave a voicemail.

I wish that were the case for me. Most calls and most resulting voicemails I receive are from scammers.

It's frustrating because all we'd need is some way to trace calls back to source providers and then let us apply client-side filtering akin to UBlock Origin. Easy.

Android has the option to ring if the same number calls within 15 minutes. I find it handy at least (though my robocall level is really low compared to the tales told here).

I'm guessing the reason you waited 20 minutes is because you know a call isn't a casual form of communication these days. I think people would say the norm should be that after 10 minutes you text the parents. In most case you will get a response sooner and if the didn't pick up you wouldn't be left wondering if something went wrong or they just dont pick up unknown numbers.