We’re nearly there… it’s the end of term and the end of covid restrictions. It’s also the end of the first year of Parent Ping. That’s right next week is our first birthday 
500 lucky Pingers will receive a birthday present in the post and early adopters will mark the milestone of 365 days on the app. Check your badge collection to see how long you’ve been PINGING and send us a birthday screenshot with the hashtag #KeepPinging
Knowing me, knowing you
Whilst a class teacher / form tutor is probably the adult that your child knows best in at school, this is not so true for parents (yellow bars in the graph below). It turns out that you know the headteacher a lot better (blue bars). Perhaps ironically (as it is the only item in our list that relates to their ability to do the job) the factoid fewest of you know is the university that school staff attend. Is this important? Probably not!
Non, je ne regrette rien
A Pinger sparked an interesting discussion in our Facebook Group last week by sharing a news article “1 in 12 regret becoming parents.” Pingers neither liked the sensationalist reporting nor the selective analysis, so they asked us to do it better!
We asked the same set of questions, and our findings are similar: 92% of mums and 95% of dads have no regrets at all. Whilst a small proportion regret it ‘to a small extent’ no one said they regret it to ‘a great extent.’ Amongst the sleep-deprived years of early parenthood, regret is slightly higher (like 2%) but this drops away as the kids get older and things get easier (or at least the challenges centre less around lack of sleep!)
If you could turn back time, would you plan your family any differently? Whilst most of you wouldn’t change anything, quite a few of you would have liked to have had more children not less!
Freedom!
With “freedom day” approaching next week, we checked on how you’re feeling about heading out and about. Across all activities your willingness to participate has grown, and looking specifically at enclosed or activities that are likely to be crowded, we see a definite increase in confidence from last summer when we first asked (despite a little wobble when we checked last month, shortly after the emergence of the Delta Variant).
However, three-quarters of dads and two-thirds of mums say that the removal of lockdown measures in England make them feel less safe. A similar proportion are concerned about their children’s safety. We’ll keep an eye on this with more questions on Monday.
And also...
🎭 The top event in the school calendar for dads is parents’ evening, but for mums it’s the school play.
👩💻 62% of parents with children in secondary school would like to keep online parents’ evenings, compared to 48% of parents with children in primary school wanted this.
Coming up next week
As we mark our first birthday, we will be asking some of the same questions as we asked 12 months ago to see how your opinions have changed (or not). We’ll also be asking the first in a new set of questions about the summer holidays.