Everyday life
A second phone number for parents: school, clubs, sitters and second-hand buys
Family life generates contact forms, class groups, sellers and sitters. A household number takes all of it, can be shared between parents by forwarding, and keeps your personal number for friends.
Having children multiplies the number of people who need your phone number: the school office, three clubs, a childminder, the parents of every friend, the seller of the second-hand bike, the dentist. Most of them need it for years. Few of them are people you would call friends. A household number keeps that world reachable without giving each of them the number you use for your own life.
One number for the household
Get a local number and name it after the family. Put it on the school forms, the club registrations and the childminder's contract. Calls and texts to it arrive in the app; you answer or reply from it. Because the number belongs to the household rather than to one parent's personal line, nobody's private number is the one on the class list.
Pass it between parents
Whoever is on pick-up duty should get the call. Switch on call forwarding on the family number and enter the other parent's phone; every call to the family number rings them until you switch it off. It takes a moment and needs no explanation to the school. See Forward your calls to another phone.
Keep the contacts separate
Save the class parents, coaches and sitters as Second Phone contacts. They live inside the app, not in your phone's address book, so your personal contacts stay personal and the family contacts are all in one list, with names on calls and messages. See Create a private Second Phone contact.
Texts, photos and voice notes
"Which gate?" "Can you send the form?" "He left his coat." Family logistics run on texts. The family number's conversations sit under that number on the Messages tab, with photos going back and forth as MMS and voice notes recorded in the chat when typing is impossible. See Start a conversation and send a message.
Second-hand everything
Children's clothes, bikes and cots move through marketplaces, and every listing means a stranger with your number. Put the family number on listings and the transaction never touches your personal line. When the cot has gone, the buyer's number is in a conversation you can swipe away.
Quiet hours
Set business hours on the family number and switch on voicemail. Club coaches calling at 9 pm reach a greeting; genuine emergencies come to the personal number that only close people have.
Frequently asked questions
Can both parents have the app and the same number?
The number belongs to one account and rings in that account's app. To share it, forward it to the other parent's phone when they are on duty, and switch forwarding off when you are. Both can, of course, hold their own Second Phone numbers.
Will the school know it is a second number?
No. It is an ordinary local number. The school calls it and it rings.
What happens when the children leave school?
Keep the number for the next chapter, deactivate it, or delete it. Nothing else in your life needs updating, because your personal number was never on the forms.