If you’re employed what happens when your child is sick?

[cadburyegg]

My 7yo off school til Wednesday due to sickness bug. I work hybrid, supposed to be in office Monday and Tuesdays but fortunately my boss is understanding and I can wfh. My ex not willing to help so very lucky I can do this.

Just got me wondering how flexible / understanding other employers are? Would your boss allow you to wfh or if you work in a job where it’s not possible do you have to take parental/annual leave? Do you share with child’s other parent?

We both have jobs where we cannot work from home (teacher and electrician). Whether my leave is paid or unpaid is at the discretion of the headteacher and may depend on level of previous absence. Some days I go to work for the morning then come back at lunch time and my DH goes to work for the afternoon which is a bit bonkers but seems to work best for us.

When my DS was a child I could only WFH one day a week and I had very little support. I used to make sure I had annual leave and my boss let me take it at short notice. I was also lucky that my DS wasn't often sick. It was a constant juggling act.

I’ve had my manager tell me I couldn’t leave to collect my 13yo son who was sick. Dh was in another country, his mum was in hospital. She actually blocked my way and said it would set a precedent. I said I’m so sorry but I have to. The next two days I left him home alone and rang every two hours. A hill I will die on is that it’s negligent parenting to do this no matter what the age, everyone deserves to have someone there to look in on them and after them when they’re sick and I hate I’ve still had to do this since. A lottery win and I’d skip out of employment happily!!!

If you are in the UK & it was your legal right to leave and they were very wrong in trying to stop you (assuming you were not leaving something in an unsafe situation eg half way through fixing a gas leak or leaving a class of children unattended.

they cannot discipline you etc for taking a day or two to look after a sick child. It would be automatic unfair dismissal if they tried.

I wfh and dc are older now. When they were younger, I took the odd day off or my parents had them if it wasn’t sickness or diarrhoea. Luckily mine weren’t sick often and I worked part time.

My youngest is the only one still under 18, and he doesn't live with me, but last Monday he had yellow scleras so he was taken to urgent care then admitted. On Tuesday the children's home manager texted me and arranged for a train ticket for me, and then a room at Premier Inn. The system at my work is to request to drop a shift on the app. This can fail. It failed, but I was at the other end of the country and I refused to leave my DS. I lost a day's money, we'll see what happens when I go back on Wednesday.

DS has been diagnosed with Gilbert syndrome, which my eldest DC also has, but was diagnosed as an adult and I didn't know until I told him. It's not serious, thankfully. Adding this because I didn't want loads of questions about what's wrong with him.

Unpaid leave. Lone parent.

I work for a lovely family run company who are very understanding when it comes to kids, if I have to take time off because my ds4 is off sick they still pay me, I'm very lucky!

My SIL has now got 2 days off this week to look after her son with chickenpox. She works long hours and goes over and above.

I am incredibly lucky that my children had strong immune systems and were almost never off sick when they were younger. Now they're teenagers so would be able to stay at home alone.

I get the first day off free to make arrangements. Then back to work. I can't work from home. In practice I've never needed the first day because due to the nature/ working hours/ last minute overtime of my job and husband's job we have nannies as childcare so on the few occasions a child has been sick, the nanny has just looked after them.

I was lucky. My bosses were all female and all had kids (albeit older than mine). They were quite sympathetic. It probably helped that I had built up a good reputation before I had DC - they knew I was reliable and if I was taking time off, it was genuine. Working from home wasn't an option back then, so I used Annual Leave. Ex was reluctant to take time off work and had a, "Sure, just put her in the creche and see what happens", attitude. So it was mostly me taking time off. It was stressful though and I'm so glad those days are behind me. MIL took DD for a few days when she had chicken pox. But she had a holiday home abroad, so she wasn't always around to help out.

I WFH and have done for years and have a very flexible employer so have always just been told to do what I can, and catch up when I’m able.

That's awful!
Agree with you that any child needs someone there when they are ill, even older children and teens.
We can just work from home if the need is there (sick child or other) - we have an extremely flexible set-up. Normal arrangement is about 50-50 office-WFH but we can flex it more if needed.

I was lucky that when my children were small my mum was retired and already helped with childcare. If she wasn’t available but MIL was in the country (lived abroad) she would take the kids. My sister also worked shifts but would help out.

Alternatively DH worked in his family’s business working split shifts, he could normally miss the morning and I would leave early so he could get in for his evening shift. I could work from home if necessary, and my employer was very understanding as they knew we had a good support system and if I needed to be off, I needed to be.

I work in HR and occasionally we have to put someone in a procedure if dependents leave is excessive but youre generally allowed a fair amount of time for this before we do that. Need to have a limit tho.

I used to take annual leave (found out other teams in the same department were offered paid parental leave which was very annoying) but now they are older I wfh if I can or send them to nanny's house for a few hours. They haven't been very ill for years so if it ever came up I'd ask for parental or annual leave to look after them. Dh could ask for leave and would if he had to but my work if much more flexible.

A mixture of:

• taking turns for emergency leave
• holiday
• family
• if our work schedules allow, flexing our work so that key meetings and chunks of work are done, each covering about 6h or so (assuming he naps for a good while in the day if unwell)

It depends really, if they are just asleep or too ill to do anything other than watch TV I might WFH, otherwise I may take some annual leave or flexi. DH is self employed and has some flexibility so he would move things around so he could care for them as well, also his Mum might come over for a bit to help out.

I was a single mum working for the emergency services. Luckily, my supervisors were all personally lovely and tried their best to let me have AL at short notice when they could when my child was sick.

There were other days where it seemed impossible and I was already on a warning for my own sickness (having taken 5 days off in 3 instances over the course of the year!). I panicked and sent my sick child to school. Which I feel absolutely awful for doing, for both him and the other kids. I was on probation and I felt under so much pressure that I felt I had no choice as they were picking at a few different things (none performance related, might I add). If I lost my job then I would’ve lost my house as I could barely make ends meet as it was. I was in a professional operational role that required a degree and I was on 23k, barely making ends meet, working shifts, including weekends and nights. I know it seems silly to do that with a child, but I became a single mum shortly after starting and I knew it was my only hope as the salary would eventually rise and it was better to stay in the job than try something else (deadbeat dad still hasn’t paid maintenance 3 years later).

What I’m trying to say is that sometimes people make choices they wouldn’t usually make because they are feeling stressed and desperate.

I was very fortunate that back in the dim distant past of the early 2000s - before Zoom meetings and logging into work from home - my boss was a woman with 2 secondary age dc. One of her dc had epilepsy and she was occasionally called to pick her up from school (her DH was a teacher in a different school) and sympathetic to sick kid incidents.