A WhatsApp group never sleeps

Inside the parallel WhatsApp universes of new mothers and new fathers in the first three years

662 messages. 31 days. One mothers' WhatsApp group.

It is 11:56 PM on a Tuesday. A mother in Bengaluru has been awake monitoring her toddler's fever since 10:40 PM. Six women in a WhatsApp group have been awake with her, trading dosing protocols, cold-compress techniques and warnings about febrile seizures from their own experience.

At 11:56 PM, she types:

I don't think I'm sleeping tonight anyway 😅
11:56 PM

She is still awake because there is still something to monitor. Over the 31 days I analysed, this group exchanged 662 messages. There wasn't a single day without activity, with messages appearing from 5 AM until midnight.

I had been part of this group for years, but I had never really looked at what all that conversation amounted to. Here is what one month of those messages actually showed.

The 18-hour day

The group has two peaks in activity. The first is around 10 AM, after the morning rush of breakfast, tiffins and playschool drop-offs, and once the domestic worker has either arrived or not arrived. The second is around 9 PM, after children are usually in bed. Both peaks arrive in what might otherwise have been a pause in the day.

24% of messages were sent between 9 PM and 1 AM.

158 messages were sent during hours most people would consider personal time.

5 AM was the earliest message.

What 300 mothers talk about when they talk

I categorised the 662 messages by topic. A message about a child's fever landing at 11 PM counted the same as a nanny recommendation at 10 AM. Some messages touched more than one category, so the percentages overlap.

And then there was the smallest category: the mothers' own health, at 2.7 percent.

Her hormones. Her breastfeeding pain. Her tampon question. Herself.

How much of this group is for her?

Very little of the conversation that month was about the mothers themselves.

One mother asked about tampons for the first time. It was 8:29 PM on a Wednesday, sandwiched between a thread about screen time and one about chocolate spread. She got an answer in four minutes.

Then the group moved on.

At 10:40 PM, someone's toddler had a fever

One of the conversations that stayed with me began late at night.

Hi, my 18 month old has a neck temp of 99.9. Should I give Calpol now? 10:40 PM
First of all 🫂. Yes, you can give Calpol. Repeat in 4 hrs if fever doesn't come down. 10:44 PM
Please keep monitoring even while he's asleep. My son had a febrile seizure at 19 months, so we are extra cautious now. 11:07 PM
Hey, same here. Febrile seizure at 19 months. Check every hour if you can. I know it's exhausting but it's worth it. 11:54 PM
I don't think I'm sleeping tonight anyway 😅 11:56 PM
Cold compress, not lukewarm. Room temp water, muslin cloth, chest and forehead. You've got this 💙 12:04 AM

A mother, awake past midnight, held up by other mothers who have been here before.

Who does the work of knowing?

300 members · one month

Each dot represents one member of the group. The ones highlighted asked at least one question this month, generating conversations whose answers were available to the rest of the group.

61 mothers posted a question this month.

The answers those questions generated were available to nearly 300 mothers, including those who never posted.

5.6× average responses generated per question asked.

In the paid economy, this might be called a platform, a knowledge service or a community product. Here it is a WhatsApp group, and much of its usefulness comes from mothers contributing what they have already learnt & no one is paying them for any of it.

But the group isn't only a record of what mothers know. It may also help explain how they came to know so much in the first place.

My husband and I became parents on exactly the same day. On that first day, neither of us knew which pediatrician to call for what kind of symptoms, what counted as a worrying fever, when to introduce cow's milk or when people started thinking about playschool.

But I became part of groups where other mothers' questions passed through my phone every day. Someone's seven-month-old wasn't eating. Someone else's toddler wasn't talking yet. Someone needed a pediatric dentist. Someone was comparing playschools.

Most of these weren't questions I had asked, and many weren't even relevant to me yet. But I was reading them. By the time something became relevant in my own home, I might already have encountered it several times. I had some sense of what to search for or whom I could ask, and sometimes simply knew that this was something parents thought about.

Sometimes the most useful thing the group gave me wasn't an answer. It was knowledge of the question before I needed to ask it.

That, to me, is another kind of infrastructure. Hundreds of small pieces of experience circulate through the group and, over time, become part of what some of us know about raising children.

Nanny searches, every week

Some problems get researched, decided and put away. Finding and managing care isn't always one of them. In every week of the month I analysed, someone in the group was looking for a nanny.

For the women in this group, finding a nanny or cook repeatedly ran through informal networks. Someone would ask whether anybody had a contact, whether an agency was reliable, or whether another mother knew someone looking for work. A nanny search could be solved in one household and return a week later in another.

The recurrence interested me as much as the number. The group had become one of the places through which families kept their own care arrangements running.

What happens while you wait?

The fever conversation made me think about another kind of work. Allison Daminger's framework for cognitive labour describes four parts of it: anticipating needs, identifying options, deciding among them and monitoring outcomes.

I could see those processes in the conversation. A mother whose child had previously experienced a febrile seizure anticipated a possibility the mother asking the question might not have considered. Others offered options, and the mother with the sick child decided what to do and continued monitoring the fever.

But I kept returning to the hours after the decisions had been made. Somebody still had to stay awake and check again, while not knowing whether the fever would rise.

I found myself thinking of this as holding: the emotional work of staying with uncertainty while you wait for an outcome.

I noticed something similar in conversations about pumping, weaning, separation and developmental worries. The practical question might have an answer, but the uncertainty didn't always disappear with it.

Pumping all day long is becoming painful. Help!

Six minutes later:

I teared up reading this. I am so exhausted.

Sometimes another mother couldn't solve the uncertainty either. She could simply sit with you in it for a few messages.

I looked at the dads' groups too

My husband had joined fathers' WhatsApp groups for much the same reason I had joined mothers' groups: we were new parents and there was a lot we didn't know.

I looked at two of those groups as well, one Bengaluru-specific with 115 members and another pan-India group with 963 members. I counted messages, mapped topics and looked at when things were sent.

By then, I was interested in more than who was messaging more. If these groups were part of the infrastructure through which I was learning to parent, what did the equivalent infrastructure look like for fathers?

Mothers' group
~300 members
662 messages / 31 days

National dads' group
963 members
137 messages / 17 days

Bengaluru dads' group
115 members
11 messages / ~4 months

These aren't matched samples. The mothers' group is cohort-specific while the fathers' groups aren't, and the periods analysed differ. The numbers therefore can't tell us how much cognitive labour mothers and fathers perform in general. What they show is narrower: these particular WhatsApp groups were being used very differently.

What I didn't see in the dads' groups

The fathers' groups did discuss parenting. There were questions about Aadhaar linkage, insurance, NPS and passports. People shared articles, recommended or sold products, and occasionally discussed playschool.

Several categories that appeared repeatedly in the mothers' group did not appear in the fathers' data I analysed. I found no food-safety discussions or conversations about toddler fibre requirements, formula transitions or weaning. There were no nanny searches or cook referrals in either sample, and I didn't see conversations resembling the emotional-support threads in the mothers' group.

Their absence doesn't tell me that these fathers weren't doing this work elsewhere. A WhatsApp export can't see a father Googling at midnight, calling his parents, talking privately to friends or simply doing something without discussing it in a group.

What the data does tell us is that these fathers were not using these groups to build and exchange the same kinds of everyday care knowledge. Where they were getting that knowledge instead, this dataset cannot tell us.

And that raises another question: if mothers and fathers begin parenting at roughly the same point, but participate in very different information environments, what happens to who becomes the expert at home?

One of the few extended conversations in the Bengaluru dads' group came from a father who felt disconnected from his child. Other fathers responded warmly, and twice the advice was that his wife should consciously step back during bath time or bedtime so that he could take over. It is one conversation and cannot tell us how families generally negotiate involvement, but it made me curious about how households transfer responsibility and expertise alongside the tasks themselves.

Who becomes the person who knows?

This mothers' group is one particular community in Bengaluru. It cannot tell us how all mothers or fathers organise care, and the fathers' groups cannot tell us what those men were doing or learning elsewhere.

What the comparison made me wonder about instead was how unequal expertise gets built in the first place.

My husband and I became parents on the same day. But I became part of an information environment in which other people's questions gradually became part of what I knew. A paediatrician's name encountered six months ago could become useful when my own child fell ill. A conversation about admissions could mean I knew there was something to look up before I had begun looking. Information accumulated without every piece of it having to begin with a question of my own.

Over time, that knowledge can compound. Once one person knows which doctor to call, which school forms are due or where to begin when a child stops eating, it becomes easy for the household to ask that person the next question too.

The person who already knows can become the person who keeps knowing.

That is what this month of WhatsApp messages ultimately made me curious about. I started by looking for evidence of the mental work mothers were doing and found plenty of it. But the messages also made visible something that happens further upstream: some of the ways a parent acquires the knowledge that later allows her to remember, anticipate and manage.

I don't know from these groups alone how large a role WhatsApp plays in creating that difference, or whether fathers are acquiring the same knowledge somewhere I cannot see. Those are questions this dataset opens rather than answers.

What I can see is how ordinary the process looks while it is happening. Somebody else's toddler has a fever, another mother is searching for a nanny, or someone asks a question you don't need the answer to yet. Your phone lights up, you read it, and another small piece of information becomes something you know.

A note on the data

This analysis draws on three WhatsApp groups: one Bengaluru mothers' group and two fathers' groups, one Bengaluru-specific and one national.

The mothers' group includes roughly 300 members, primarily mothers of children born in 2023–24. I analysed 662 messages over 31 days, from April 7 to May 7, 2026. The national fathers' group had 963 members; I analysed 137 messages from April 15 to May 1, 2026. The Bengaluru fathers' group had 115 members and 11 messages across December 11, 2025 to March 17, 2026.

The groups are not matched samples. The mothers' group is cohort-specific while the fathers' groups are general parenting groups, and the periods analysed differ. The comparisons here should therefore be read as observations about how these particular groups functioned rather than estimates of differences between mothers and fathers more broadly.

Messages were categorised by topic, with some appearing in more than one category. The analysis captures group-based information exchange around care. It cannot capture work done privately, information sought elsewhere or care work that never appears in a WhatsApp message.

Before doing the analysis, I told the mothers' group that I wanted to analyse patterns across some of the mothers' groups I belonged to, at an aggregate and de-identified level, to understand what they might tell us about who takes care of the home, and that I intended to compare this with a fathers' group. No one raised an objection. My husband similarly informed the fathers' group.

I am also a member of the mothers' group. Being inside this community made the analysis possible, but it also shapes the questions I noticed and the interpretation I have offered.