Parents use annual leave or take unpaid leave to care for sick children - new Mumsnet survey

[JuliaMumsnet]

Hello

This morning we released a survey of more than 1000 parents in partnership with Harriet Harman MP, and with input from Caroline Nokes MP, about how parents in paid work manage when their children are sick. It revealed that:

88% reported having taken time off work to care for a sick primary school aged child. Of these:

• 39% had taken holiday/annual leave
• 29% had taken paid leave
• 29% had taken unpaid leave
• 10% had reduced hours or dropped work
• 7% had taken sick leave
• 2% had left their job

Almost a third of parents (29%), and more than half of C2DE parents (52%), are taking unpaid leave to look after their children, with C2DE parents twice as likely to take unpaid leave than ABC1 parents (26%). Almost four in ten parents had taken holiday/annual leave to look after sick children. ABC1 parents were twice as likely (31%) to take paid leave to look after sick children compared to C2DE parents (15%).

The situation is even more dire for single parents, more than 90% of whom are women. Single parents were almost 60% more likely to take unpaid leave than parents living with a partner (43% compared to 27%).

12% of parents in the survey, most of whom were mothers, had reduced their hours, dropped work, or even left their job to deal with having sick children. 10% had reduced their hours or dropped work due to caring responsibilities related to caring for a sick child.

Unsurprisingly parents supported provision to be able to better manage their children’s sick days without losing pay or losing holiday time.

When asked if they would support extending statutory sick pay to cover a parent when a child of primary school or nursery age is sick, 90% of parents supported the idea, with only 6% opposing it.

More info here and our posts on Instagram here, twitter here and Facebook here.

Let us know what you think!

Thanks

MNHQ

I would support this, I cover child sickness by taking annual leave usually. If I am also sick then I would take a sick day. Paid time off for sick children would benefit parents but it would also probably make parents (like me) less likely to send their kids into school with colds and spread them around.

I support more support for working parents. But tell me what happens when my nursery staff are off because their children are sick and I have to close the nursery? What happens to working parents then? This type of flexibility cannot easily be extended without a negative impact somewhere. I am not sure what the answer is.

For a case like the one you describe, nurseries would bring in supply staff from the council’s supply pool - not ideal, of course, but that is how it would be managed.

There is no supply pool here. And the nursery sector is struggling to recruit generally and operates on the basis of legal minimum ratios on poor funding.

For sure it isn’t a system that could just be lifted into a different context, totally hear you. It’s the kind of thing that could be possible, but I’m guessing not under Boris and co :-(

@twobarnsmammisonthebus

For sure it isn’t a system that could just be lifted into a different context, totally hear you. It’s the kind of thing that could be possible, but I’m guessing not under Boris and co :-(

Not if I had a choice about it either. As a childless person I've done more than enough coverage in my time. A colleague's child got taken to hospital - obviously I'll cover. My boss's wife went into early labour - happy to cover. But my colleague that works three mornings a week with a son with Crohns disease and the most accident prone daughter ever - I'm covering a morning every other week. And my work is time sensitive. Do I get compensation for picking up the slack and doing the work of two people? Er, no. And now people are saying, "oh goodie, my child has a sniffle, we'll all have the day off?!! All for the good of my colleagues, of course." Well, fuck that for a game of soldiers. Give me the cold and let me have a day off. Unless you've got a mass of coverage in Sweden, do not be fooled in thinking your child free colleagues are not bothered about your absences.

I'm a lone parent with no support and as I work in a school so can't take annual leave. I can barely cover my bills if I have time off so it's hard going. Luckily my children haven't been Ill too often. When one of my children developed anorexia and was hospitalised my doctor signed me off with stress so I wouldn't lose money as we couldn't have survived.

Believe me, people aren’t using the system lightly to get time off when their kids have a sniffle! As I say, it’s a tool as part of a system whereby you are less likely to find yourself having to do unpaid overtime and more recourse to legal protection if there is an issue. Of course, I’ve said further upthread that I’m not naive enough to think it’s a perfect system, but it does work.

@Sparkles715

There is no supply pool here. And the nursery sector is struggling to recruit generally and operates on the basis of legal minimum ratios on poor funding.

All your point does is highlight how caring for children isnt valued - even when its a paid role, it doesn't pay enough to attract or keep people in that profession. Meanwhile the nursery owners are making a killing and parents are paying thousands of pounds so they can keep working.

If a child gets sick, the parent still has to pay for their place at nursery, on top of possibly having to take unpaid leave.

That's might be bearable if your kids only sick for a short time but if it was longer than a week, it could be crippling for many families.

Looking at childcare and the way its funded and administrated is part of looking at the picture.

What some people don't understand is that many parents ( or lone parents - why should being ' single' define you as a parent) don't have the option of staying at home with their child. We all can wring our hands, fight about what's best and say they should have done something different/better but whether we like it or not, many parents are now in that position.

Should we leave them and their families to spiral further down into economic difficulties, until they become more and more vulnerable and the state ends up paying the bill anyway?

Also people die too, we just had a pandemic, theres many legitimate reasons why a sick child might be the final straw financially. We don't live in a perfect world but we can help to try and make the one we live in better. We should try to prevent parents from having a harder time than necessary. Maybe than those children would grow up and make the so called right choices.

Also caring for a sick child is by no means a holiday, its bloody scary if they're very ill.

I would support policies that allowed parents to transfer their sick leave to their child with maybe an extra allowance per child in terms of disciplinary triggers. If the sickness absence procedure would apply, less people would take the piss as working people without children seem to be most concerned about.

I would support more radical changes but there is little appetite for it.

@twobarnsmammisonthebus

Believe me, people aren’t using the system lightly to get time off when their kids have a sniffle! As I say, it’s a tool as part of a system whereby you are less likely to find yourself having to do unpaid overtime and more recourse to legal protection if there is an issue. Of course, I’ve said further upthread that I’m not naive enough to think it’s a perfect system, but it does work.

@twobarnsmammisonthebus Of course, I’ve said further upthread that I’m not naive enough to think it’s a perfect system, but it does work.

Yeah for people with children. You've only had a couple of comments and already people are saying they can keep children with colds off school, see quote below...
"it would also probably make parents (like me) less likely to send their kids into school with colds and spread them around."

I don't know if you have children or not but if you do, I can 100% guarantee you that when you're saying, "I've got to go off because my 11yo has chickenpox so I won't be back for 2 weeks", your child free colleague isn't going, "oh this Swedish system is so wonderful". No. They're actually going...🤬🤬🤬

Don't be fooled because they smile politely.

Where I work we get given the first day of a child's sickness off to look after them and to make further arrangements if needed.

We didn't have any time off as a family for over a year when our first was little because we burned through all our annual leave caring for our child with recurrent tonsillitis. We live abroad now in a country where you can take off up to 120 days a year off if your child is sick, paid by the state at 80% of your usual income (there is an upper cap but it is quite high). You can also take some of these days if your child's normal caregiver is sick, eg grandparents or childminder. It is an infinitely better system than the UK.

@Mackerson

Um... Crohn's disease is pretty serious, especially in a child. It can cause malnutrition and abscesses in the intestines, and it can be really painful.

https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/crohns-disease/

https://www.crohnsandcolitis.org.uk/about-crohns-and-colitis/publications/crohns-disease

I'm not surprised your part-time colleague has to take mornings off sometimes to manage that.

As for an accident-prone kid, some injuries have to be dealt with in the moment. If it's a concussion, a cut that needs stitches, a sprained ankle, a broken bone, or a serious burn, it needs to be seen by a medic and treated then and there. It can't wait until Mummy completes her shift first.

That said, you make a valid point about being unfairly overloaded.

IMO, managers across all industries need to step up and be better about allocating workloads, and be more responsive when situations like sick kids or emergencies arise. But I'm thinking of the many and several male directors at my company when I say that, as well as the many and several men I've reported to in the past. Far too many gentlemen I've worked for have treated management roles as an achievement to list on their CV as they work their way up salary brackets, rather than acknowledge the responsibility it requires of them.

I also agree with a PP who said there's a serious gap in privilege between office based and hands-on jobs. I'm in the former category, and if my kid is vomiting (no childminder, daycare or school that day for them, then! ... Or for 48 hours after the final vomit!), I can WFH and can always postpone some of my day's tasks to later in the week or month. I wouldn't be able to do that if I was working in a shop, a restaurant, a factory, a salon, on an oil and gas platform, or face-to-face with patients/clients.

You should be ashamed of yourselves Mumsnet for collaborating with Caroline Noakes, a woman who led the abolition of Widowed Parents Allowance, ensuring families don't receive the pensions of their dead spouses and increasing financial hardship at the worse possible time.

Exactly, as Preech said, managers should be arranging it so that tasks are prioritised / deprioritised etc so that colleagues are not having to work double if their colleagues are off work looking after kids.

This also requires a culture whereby people are more willing to accept delays, less quick service etc on occasion - we’ve become very used to everything happening at the drop of a hat, but in reality when the human aspect is taken into account, things can’t always work like that.

I do understand that my family is in a privileged position because we've managed an arrangement whereby one of us is always free for childcare, and that other families cannot manage that and may need support.

On the other hand, we have made a lot of decisions deliberately to get to this point, and some of those involved sacrifices and in some ways a lower standard of living (particularly pre-children). It does feel unfair if we're then going to be taxed more (because you couldn't do anything about this without spending more government money) to pay for other people getting extra leave that we'll never use.

I don't know what the answer is (though more transferable tax allowance would be nice, it wouldn't actually do much for us as we're trying to move to both working PT), but I'd like to offer that perspective. Whatever solution is suggested, it would be nice if families like ours didn't lose out via the tax system.

@110APiccadilly what a bizarre way of looking at it. You would be welcome to use the leave if you choose to set up your lives in a way that you need it.

Do you also think eg childfree people shouldn’t be contributing to schools, non drivers should opt out of paying for roads etc? If everyone took that view we wouldn’t provide any state benefits or services at all.

Why should those without children have to pick up the work of those why do?

This is the point - they often do not. No, it’s not a perfect system and sure, there will be times when they do have to. But equally there will be times when childfree people are off and people with kids have to pick up their work. But in a system with clear rules around overtime, a culture where work life balance is prioritised, and good management, then it does work well. And it’s hardly unreasonable that as a society we have policies in place that prioritise children’s welfare, surely? But it also as I say relies to some extent on the idea that if people are off sick looking after kids, and coworkers aren’t expected to cover for them, then society as a whole has to accept that some services will be delayed. Everything interlinks.

@badg3r

We didn't have any time off as a family for over a year when our first was little because we burned through all our annual leave caring for our child with recurrent tonsillitis. We live abroad now in a country where you can take off up to 120 days a year off if your child is sick, paid by the state at 80% of your usual income (there is an upper cap but it is quite high). You can also take some of these days if your child's normal caregiver is sick, eg grandparents or childminder. It is an infinitely better system than the UK.

I guess we maybe live in the same country?

@Preech. Thanks but you don't need to send me links about Crohns. I work with the mother. Trust me, I know all about Crohns and how serious it is. They were considering cutting away some of his intestines at one point. He had real problems and was only at junior school.
I was sympathetic. At first. But not every other flaming week. I'm enabling her to earn a wage. In effect she's taking home part of my wage packet.
You're right that she has to take care of her children but that shouldn't be my problem. They're not my children. She had them, she took on the job knowing what her situation was, and now I'm paying the price. And the company won't just have somebody on standby waiting for the next day it happens.

@twobarnsmammisonthebus
But equally there will be times when childfree people are off and people with kids have to pick up their work.
But as a childless person I already cover when people are off sick. But I'm expected cover when colleagues are off sick AND when their children are off sick. They only have to cover when I'm off sick. Can you not see the disparity?

I always take unpaid leave when toddler is sick (which has been a lot lately), as else I would have no leave left. Annual leave is not just for holidays! If you have an inflexible employer, annual leave is required for time off for things like staying at home to get the boiler fixed. Not everyone has grandparents or extended family to step in and help.

As we pay for £50 per day for nursery, unpaid leave is very costly as I still pay for the nursery days as well as not being paid for the time off. In reality this means that some months I don't earn anything after the cost of childcare.

What would help me would be a government scheme that reimbursed me (or the nursery so they could take the money off my bill) for the childcare cost for my toddler's sick days. This would also have the added benefit of decreasing the spread of illnesses in childcare, as so many parents send in sick children to infect others.

There is also the added issue at present of children having time off childcare/ school to isolate for Covid/ suspected Covid. This is really putting pressure on working parents who have to take time off to be at home with the children.

There is some gender inequality due to the gender pay gap...my husband earns more than me, so of course it makes sense for me to take unpaid leave rather than him.

Honestly, I am actually on the verge of handing in my notice at the moment due to these issues. And I have worked so hard to build up my career, but my pay is still relatively humble and it just doesn't seem worth it some months with all of the unpaid leave.

I should have said...so many parents send in sick children to infect others as they have paid for the childcare and don't want to lose that money.

@badg3r that sounds amazing, what country is that?

@Mackerson of course I can see the disparity, but what alternative do you suggest? Taking unpaid leave has financial implications which can be so serious that people, usually women, are forced out of the workplace. Taking annual leave leaves people missing out on time which is desperately needed to get a break from work, crucial for mental health. The solution should come from employers, who should not require you to take on extra work if a colleague is sick - clearly there are some professions where this wouldn’t be practical, but it could be possible in many more workplaces than we might currently think, if workers’ rights were put above profit. Plus as others have said, it avoids people feeling that they have to their sick kids into school / nursery and spread their germs to all and sundry, and it allows children to recover and rest at home, which is surely a good thing for them?