I'm just sick of the mindset that parents with young children should be prioritised for consideration.
I worked in a school, so Christmas holidays weren't an issue. However, I was a middle manager. The understanding was that middle managers wouldn't be given register classes (unless someone was absent) because we needed that time to deal with issues that might have arisen the previous day - chasing up behavioural problems, etc.
My HT told me that the new teacher coming to us would not be taking the register class on her timetable because she had 'to get 4 young children ready in the morning'. She also couldn't do period 1 classes for the same reason, so my timetable had to be changed.
At that time, I was getting up in the morning, waking up my husband to help him partially dress and then letting him sleep again - he suffered from hemiparesis, following a stroke.
I was also told that the SLT had agreed that she wouldn't have to write report cards and therefore wouldn't have to attend parents' evenings. (No, not kidding.) They were running scared of her because she'd previously gone to an industrial tribunal, complaining that accommodations had not been made for her parenthood. (No, she wasn't a single mother. Her husband was in the SLT at another school. Yes, I'm certain that that little fact also influenced them, but it was the industrial tribunal that had the biggest impact.)
I looked my line manager in the eye and asked 'So who's writing them, then?'
Yup. He'd expected Muggins here to do it. I smiled sweetly and told him that the SLT had made the arrangement, so they'd better deal with the problem.