To think people want to wrap kids up in cotton wool now?!

Change jobs or career paths. Your children come first. I don’t think kids should be kept off for sniffles, coughs etc but sending your child into school when they have a temperature, infection or rash etc is neglect.

It seems to have been phases. As a child (70s) if we were obviously unwell, colds or otherwise, we stayed home. A note was written explaining why we had been off on our return. If we were taken ill at school we went to medical room and the school nurse looked after us until the end of school day. There were a couple of beds. This was an ordinary state primary in a market town. Not everyone had home phones, we certainly didn't so there wasn't any way of contacting parents whether they were working or SAHM.
When my DC were primary in early 90s, it had gone to school ringing if they so much as sniffed and no expectation of being in if remotely off colour. The downside was once their contemporaries started in the workplace they expected to take sick days for everything down to a headache. Mobiles were starting to be popular so parents contactable.
Now DGC are expected in unless at deaths door to meet government targets but no medical rooms if they are ill and parents expected to drop everything to collect.

I don't think people should go to work/ school if they're properly unwell. But bog standard colds and coughs are a completely normal phenomenon, particularly in the winter.

Before covid and the norm of hybrid working people just went to work and school with colds and just cracked on. I dont remember people falling down dead in the street as a result. Mild viruses boost the immune system and make us more resilient to more serious illnesses. Being prissy about it can actually risk making you iller if you catch something worse.

One winter in my early 20s I had 11 colds, literally one after the other. If I had gone off sick every time I would have been sacked within weeks.

Sort emergency childcare for these situations? School isn't childcare

If one ax me, they should be down t'pit or workin' t'loom. Not mitherin' about in t'parlour glued t'box.

If you cant get time off, then send your kids in.

If other people can, then maybe they'd rather not.
I would much prefer people didn't send sick kids in, because I don't my kids being sick and then being sick myself.
If your kids are developing immunity from being in school and not wrapped up in cotton wool, then why are they always ill?

Colds aren't just colds for every child. Mine always gets a temp with a cold so he stays at home.

TBH I would never call having an ordinary sort of cold ‘sick’. A really stinking horrible cold, yes.

It's not hard. If you have a cold and feel ill/need to be in bed, stay home. If you have a runny nose and mild cough but feel fine, take some paracetamol and carry on 🤷 With all temperatures, I'd say stay home.

If we stayed home for absolutely everything, no one would build immunity. Equally though, I hate push through culture, and feel it contributes to the spread of more serious respiratory issues where people should really just have stayed home.

Do you know how much class time can be taken up by having to attend to kids who should not have been sent in to school?

Sending them in with a slight sniffle, I can understand.
Dosing up an obviously unwell child with Calpol and leaving them for teaching staff to look after is just not on.

I do think we are severely lacking in a 'get on with it' attitude

How are we building resilience???

Having a cold never used to be a big deal I used to buy herbals on the way to school even the teacher would help themselves now everyone claims they have the flu do you have a temperature? No its unlikely to be serious then my current cold has lasted three weeks if I were a school child should I be off school? No because im fine my nose is running like crazy and im coughing but im fine

It's a bit of both isn't it? Yes I think people are overprotective now and kids got a better start to growing up in the 70s and 80s.

However, there is hopefully less emotional neglect these days, as we're more psychologically aware.. although even as I type this I'm not sure friends that are primary school teachers would agree - but I am optimistic..

I mean…

kids who are vomiting shouldn’t be in school.

neither should kids with diarrhoea because both transmit germs really really fast.

sending a sick kid in with either of those really isn’t on.

then there’s flu and tonsillitis and the rest. Kids do get seriously ill, too ill to be in school. Yes it’s shit, but schools really aren’t babysitting services for ill kids.

i speak as someone who had to leave a job when my twins got chicken pox one after the other and nursery refused to have them.

That’s why it takes a village and working full time and having kids is pretty much impossible.

Schools are a bit mental about attendance now which is probably what the video was alluding to. A lot of parents keep children at home with genuine illnesses (probably caught from school) and find that school phone them up to question it. Happened to me last week, I kept my child off for a fever, informed school and the next day they called me 10am asking where he was. Bearing in mind he'd had 100% attendance since September before that so they should trust me.

Yes, I understand that, but still... your kids are low level ill all the time?

Perhaps the answer is better protections for workers with families or something like that (actually I think more affordable living is the answer to most modern woes) but it's not sending sick adults or children into work or school to get sicker, take longer to recover and spread the illness around.

It reads to me as though your main concern is your job and income, which obviously is very reasonable, but you feel like you need to use "resilience" and "character building" and "not how I was brought up" as the justification because that seems more acceptable. But I bet that if you were fortunate enough not to have to worry about work, you also wouldn't be worrying about resilience and character and all that. You'd just take the time you needed for yourself and your kids to get better.

And I think that's what she's getting at. She's saying that people are sometimes ill and need some time off, but as a society and culture we don't like that, employers don't like it, it creates an environment where people are scared to be off, and as a result we all get sicker. If we could get a solution to that, we could recover as we need to and I don't think anyone would care about cotton wool and snowflakes and all that.

What wasn't the way you were brought up (and why was the way you were brought up so infallible?)? I can't see any issue in what she's saying. I don't think she's suggesting we all take to our beds as invalids if we have a slightly runny nose. Your OP suggests that if your kids were kept off every time they had something slightly off, they'd hardly go in at all. Is that true? Are your children really low level ill most of the time?

Well there is a post-COVID societal shift for sure, it has impacted the whole nation in complicated ways.

But it's nonsense yo pretend kids weren't off sick previously.

Plus the pressure on attendance in schools is genuinely unhealthy and counterproductive.

And we saw what happened with Covid. Because it was so infectious, lots of people got it. And the more people got it, the faster it evolved.

Edit to add: The more people got it, the bigger the chance it would infect someone who was at massive danger from it.

Don't be silly. Truanting was sky high in the 80s, people stayed home if they felt like it.

You are not grounded in facts.

If a child is sick they should be at home. That's not wrapping them in cotton wool it's just good sense.
Sick children going into school can't learn, they take up a lot of teacher time and they pass on whatever it is they have meaning more children and probably teachers have to be off sick. We are in the middle of a flu epidemic which makes it even more important to keep sick children at home.
And I'm sorry it's not a good argument to say how are you supposed to go to work if you have to look after your sick child. .
School isn't a place to care for sick children so their parents can go to work it's there to educate the child.