To not want to waste annual leave on unwell child?

[coffeeforone]

DH & I work full time and DC (age 1 and 3) go to nursery. If they are ill we alternate staying at home with them. I can do my job from home but my employer doesn't really encourage it, if DC is unwell and its my turn then I usually say I'll work remotely, doing as much as I can and make up the work in the evening once DH gets home. I don't think they are keen on this as I've done it 3 times since October and I don't get the impression they like it. They say 'ok, as a one off' but try to make alternative arrangements for next time. My alternatives would be:

1. emergency unpaid leave (legal right I think). Can't really afford lots of these days, and I don't think they'd like this either.
2. call in sick myself (I would get paid but it's a bit fraudulent). I'm never Ill myself if that makes a difference.
3. last minute holiday (which could potentially mean needing to cancel booked holiday or asking for unpaid leave

There are no alternatives are there. What would your employer ask you to do?

This is the reality of working with children. My dd is very susceptible to illness and also has between 4-6 separate medical appointments on rotation at any time. I take unpaid leave and stay late, start early, work a Saturday or my study day to make my hours up. I can't pay my bills if I leave the time off unpaid. I haven't had a day of annual leave off outside school holidays in 5 years. Making up time puts me behind with running the house and studying, I'm permanently knackered. I dread getting seriously ill myself, as it stands I haven't had a day sick in 10 years.

And people wonder why I stopped at 1 child.

Your children are your priority and responsibility. You can reasonably expect to need to use some leave or take emergency unpaid leave when they are ill. If you are able to work from home that’s great but how effective you are depends on the age/illness of your children. If Dad is around he needs to do his share.

Aaaah the conflicted situation of the poorly child, work, annual leave and the guilt and the worry all exasperated by not being near your family or someone you trust and can rely on. What to do?

Most of us bite the bullet and use up our annual leave days looking after poorly children and some of us might not then have enough time left for a break or holiday.

Some of us bite the bullet and the lesser earner goes part time to enable greater flexibility and if you are lucky to have an employer which will allow you to work the hours taken on what would be your days off ... it depends on your role.

Some can afford to bite the bullet and a parent stay home or they earn so little, they cant afford the childcare.

Some can afford and decide the cost of a nanny which is also tax deductable takes the stress out of these situations.

For info, we retained our full time jobs, paid for the child care but were lucky to have family near but when they went to school, I dropped to part time ... but it has been v difficult to regain my original earning position now they are older. Definitely if you go part time need or stay at home, just as if you were at work, need to think about/manage also looking after your career and future in other ways eg college/distance learning during those parenting years

They'd have to articulate why though
They don't. They only have to make sure the policy is applied to everybody consistently. They can have what rules of service they like as long as they are not discriminatory and don't fall foul of the law.

I work with kids and the ones in before and after school care and nursery are so broken compared to home raised kids

What a ridiculous and utterly baseless generalisation. I work with kids too and that is absolutely not my experience at all.

If being a SAHM worked well for your family when your DC were young then good for you. But you don't need to justify your own choices by demonising working parents, accusing them of "breaking" their children by putting them in after-school club FFS

Even having family nearby is only a partial solution. My parents have stepped in when DS is in that 'mostly ok but too under the weather for nursery' stage of getting better, which I am very grateful for, but I wouldn't expect them to look after him if he had D&V or - like the last time I had a day off for DS - sit in A&E with him because his croup has got to the point he's struggling to breathe. I'm not sure I'd want a nanny to do the latter, either.

I work with kids and the ones in before and after school care and nursery are so broken compared to home raised kids
i (used to) work with kids too - the problematic ones tend to be the ones with disinterested parents. many of them are unhappy SAHPs, some delegate to nannies etc. nothing to do with working/childcare, everything with parental interest

Once they started school all annual leave was taken separately to cover school holiday care. No holidays together for years apart from a week at Christmas every second year. ( I worked every second year.)
Alternated sick days with DH this came off our sick leave for the first 3 days.

And governments whine about why mothers are not getting back into the workforce. This is why.. In Norway each parent has a certain number of paid sick kid days per year, I have 10 and my DH has 12 I think depends on the employer but it's never lower than 10. If you have 3 kids then you get more days. This works out well, between us it's just enough sick days to have 1 or 2 left over at new year with two children of reasonable health.

Not allowing for paid sick days for parents to look after kids, and not making wrap-around care more affordable, is why parents find it so hard to both be in the work force. It's so important. You have my sympathy OP.

I used up leave. You can't work from home with a poorly very young child even if tbe option is there. Shit, isn't it?

home raised kids
I keep mine in kennels

Sorry, OP, you have to take AL or UL and suck it up like the rest of us do/did. It's a pain in the neck but it is a cost of having children. At least from your other posts it looks as though your DH has been doing his share - long may it last.

During the Awful Young DC Years we split our annual leave and only overlapped for a week in the summer. It was a massive pain and I still had to beg borrow and steal the odd unpaid day (even though i had a massive amount of banked time and weekend evening working anyway).

But. There is no reason why a company should employ parents on better conditions than people with no children. Or people who have other caring responsibilities. We, as women, have been fighting against the discrimination that results from this kind of thing too long to stuff it up now.

I feel for you OP, but there is light at the end of the tunnel. Eventually.

Actually I love my life thanks. Giving up city life for my kids was the best decision I have ever made. And if it makes you so mad that I'm standing up for the kids then it's not me that has to take a look in the mirror.

I volunteer my free time to give therapy to kids and trust me - they are very broken more so from affluent families who have no time for the kids because of not wanting to spend time with them. But spending every spare minute on a job that will cut them loose in the blink of an eye. I've just had a child nearly pass out in my arms because mum brought them in told us she's had a fever and been awake all night crying but she was going to work and dumped her. She needs to be at home in bed being cared for but she is in the first aid room alone on a plastic chair because mum has refused to come back to get her. She is red in the face sweating and crying and we have no spare adults to look after and aren't allowed to give medicines. That poor child won't get picked up til 6.30pm. She's not the first and won't be the last, it happens all the time and that's not counting the ones that feet left at home alone (as young as 6) while their parents go to the city and hr away. Sadly we have no idea this happens until the poor kids break down and spill it all out that they wish their parents cared about them.

So go on, tell me how mean I am making mums feel bad because I really don't care - I'm picking up the pieces for those kids and really don't have the patience for snowflake parents moaning how tough life is when they are making their kids lives worse.

If you don't want to waste leave on a sick kid then you need to re-evaluate life, not me, I'll be spending my day off looking after other people's kids who should be at home. Yes I'll be exhausted and emotionally drained but they need to be loved. Then I pick up my own kids and give them my time too because unlike a job you can't take days off from your kids, do homework with them, help them with projects, cook with them, play games and curl up and read stories. Sadly the 1000 kids im around more than 50% don't get that. So i have no problem with telling people to put the kids first.

Unpaid leave.

That’s only an option if the employer agrees

That's just how it goes though, that's what annual leave is for confused

So are you guys able to take annual leave at the drop of a hat / phone call ?

Call in sick for yourself. Annual leave is too precious when both parents work full time

Non attendance and lying for the reason would be a disciplinary or a sackable offence where I work

So are you guys able to take annual leave at the drop of a hat / phone call
Pretty much if it was an emergency or I would just swop shifts with someone else.

A lot of time I dont have to book leave for odd days off if I want to do something. We all help each other out. I havent got young kids now but a lot of staff have. I'm happy to cover for them if their kids are ill or stay on if they have to leave early. They pay back in ways that benefits me as well.

This REALLY pisses me off - the amount of staff at our place who says 'my child is sick so I'll work from home' when the policy states quite categorically that if you are looking after a child who is unwell you cannot be able to work as well. And no 'but they are asleep all the time' is not a valid excuse. Unfortunately the line managers do f**k all about it. Gets my goat ...

*Calling in sick to look after children is one of the leading reasons for the gender pay gap"

And if the 'sharing' approach required by posters is universally adopted then we will have the 'parent pay ga'...

I get 14 paid sick days a year and can use them for myself or my dependents, so I don’t need to lie. If I was in your position OP, I would probably book my holidays in advance so those days are allocated and then I would say I was sick myself.

YABU about not wanting to waste annual leave for a sick child.

So posters have indicated the following as the only options:

• unpaid emergency dependent leave
• annual leave
• 'working from home'
• family, friends, neighbours
• flexible employer / making up hours
• lie and say you are sick
• go part time / resign / go self-employed

The additional option I sometimes (well, twice) have mentioned on threads like this is buying in emergency care for sick dependent. The response I get to this is 1) it doesn't exist, 2) if it exists, it will be outrageously expensive, and 3) what type of parent callously abandons their DB in throes of an illness into the uncaring arms of a stranger.

Where I work, we have access to an agency that provides a carer precisely for this sort of situation - whether DC or elderly parents. It's a well promoted staff 'benefit'

Sounds like a good idea, Aridane

I take unpaid emergency dependent leave. As far as I’m aware there is no limit on how many days I can take a year in my company but Iv never took the piss with it.

Sometimes I take annual leave.

Sometimes I call in sick.

Of course people have to use annual leave.

Annual leave isn't guaranteed time lying on the beach with a cocktail