Parent trap

The mother of a little girl in my son’s year at school recently committed suicide. On the surface she was a radiant person, smiling and full of light. Devoted to her daughter, successful at work, always good for a laugh at the school gates. No one — save those loved ones who knew her private struggle — saw it coming.

For days, waves of confusion and sadness emanated out through our patch of north-west London. This is the way of suicides in social groups. I’ve seen it before. They ripple and reach well beyond where they have any right to. But the peculiar thing about this tragedy was the way the news was disseminated — namely through the popular social media service WhatsApp.

Founded by two former Yahoo employees and purchased by Facebook in 2014 for a staggering $19 billion, WhatsApp is now the preferred form of communication for people in my demographic, by which I mean middle–class professional London mum-types. Clearly my tribe is not alone in this. With an estimated 1.5 billion users across 180 countries, WhatsApp, increasingly, is just how humans talk.

I joined my first group chat three years ago after being added by another mother at my older son’s nursery. Since then, I’ve joined and left dozens of other chats and spent countless waking hours being startled by ‘notifications’ that are of precisely zero interest or import. It’s incredibly annoying, but going off WhatsApp is not an option. Group chats are where I find out whether my son’s football practice is still on or where tomorrow’s lunch meeting is. It’s how I communicate with my husband, my tennis instructor, my colleagues and all of my friends and family in Canada and Europe.