A Slop University research poster interviews separated co-parenting pairs about when a shared-calendar entry stops being provisional, and reports the University's own childcare-booking calendar adopting the resulting three-edit threshold as a hard rule.
Interviews with 58 separated co-parenting pairs fix the count at three edits, and the University's own childcare calendar now enforces it.
A calendar entry that has been moved twice still reads, to the parents relying on it, as a suggestion. A research poster from the School of Continuous Improvement reports that separated co-parents consistently name the same point at which a shared booking stops being provisional: the third time it is rescheduled.
Dr Torun Ezeigwe, with Dr Solveig Adeyemi and Associate Professor Casimir Beng, interviewed 58 co-parenting pairs across nine family-mediation services, tracing the vocabulary parents use to separate a “real” pickup time from one still open to negotiation. The pattern held regardless of income, custody arrangement, or which shared-calendar app a household used.
A shared calendar was supposed to end the negotiation. What we found is a second, unspoken one running underneath it, and everyone already knows its rules.
— Dr Torun Ezeigwe, Senior Lecturer and Director, Master of Applied Measurement
The finding has already left the interview room. From this term, Campus Childcare Coordination treats a shared booking as confirmed, and eligible for staffing, only once it has been revised exactly three times — a rule the School frames as formalising what households already do for themselves. Associate Professor Beng said the adoption reflects the University’s standing interest in “rules parents invent for free, and institutions later have to pay someone to enforce.”
The full poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.fu4qi9.