When I was growing up, my parents were - how to frame this as positively as possible? - completely and utterly intolerant of any physical illness in their children. Injuries - particularly the more dramatic ones my siblings and I acquired over the years, like the night I literally had the back of my skull partially caved in when my horse kicked me in the head - were more acceptable because they were evidence of interesting activity and a commendable willingness to take risks. A nasty injury also became storyspinning material for the whole family, which gave it added value in our excessively verbose clan. But my mother in particular, and my father to a lesser degree appeared to see any physical illness as a sign of flawed character and a poorly developed work ethic.
My mother came by her anti-illness tendencies honestly. Once, when I told my maternal grandmother that I thought I "might have allergies" (having heard about "allergies" for the first time when I was in 7th grade from a child who got to miss school one afternoon each week to go see her special allergy doctor, which sounded appealing), my grandmother responded - in a tone that let me know the matter had been settled - by saying, "we don't believe in allergies in our family." She went on to explain that women who suffered with "allergies" were the same sort of lollygagging, uninteresting kind of people who were continually complaining of those similarly suspect "migraines."
My father was somewhat more tolerant of the concept of illness, since he did sometimes suffer from sinus problems that caused headaches and general discomfort, but he was totally without sympathy for any whining or expression of pain due to physical injury. Once, when I was about eight years old, my pony threw me straight into a barb wire fence while my father was watching. I was wailing and covered in painful scratches, and my father's immediate response was to get down on his knee, firmly grab both my hands, look me straight in the eye and say, "Kate, you are either going to ride that horse or let the horse ride you." He then scooped me up, definitively placed me back on the (bareback) pony, and insisted that I make the pony do whatever it was I had been trying to get her to do before she slung me into the tangled, rusty wire fence. (As it happens, that was some of the best advice my father ever gave me. To this day, I find myself applying it to all kinds of areas of my life, all the time.)
In addition to simply telling us to "knock it off" if we whined about having scraped a knee or fallen off a bike, my father also had a belief that any cut or open wound required immediate and thorough application of a vile, noxious, staining purple liquid antispetic called "merthiolate." He used this stuff - which burned like hell, and was made of something sort of like the mercury-infused liquid inside a glass thermometer - on children, dogs, horses, cows - you name it. If you were an animal or young human, and you spent much time around our house, you would eventually end up having the dreaded merthiolate applied to some area of your body. The merthiolate application hurt so much more than any cut or scrape that I think we kids tended to avoid letting anyone know we had done anything like, say, sliced off the end of a toe because we figured risk of gangrene was preferable to the alternative. I think it's possible that my father played the merthiolate card as part of a carefully crafted parental strategy designed to reinforce his "no whining" message; if we whined about having stubbed a toe, we knew the merthiolate would be the result. If so, his strategery worked. No way, now how was I going to tell my parents if I stepped on a rusty nail or sliced open my leg on the pile of tin sheet roofingthat was stacked behind our barn. I'd suffer in silence, thankyouverymuch.
In my entire childhood, I never once remember my mother or grandmother taking a day to lie around and do nothing because they weren't feeling well. Sick days were verboten. I realize now, as a working mom myself, that part of the reason that that my mother and her working mother before her did not take sick days is because they simply couldn't, not without risk of losing their jobs. Even if the HR policy at the newspaper or wire service where my mother was employed said that there were so many paid sick days each year, no one thought that a woman would actually take them. And if my mother had even suggested that she would need to take her own sick time to care for a sick child, she would have been laughed at, or worse. It wasn't that her employers in the 70s and 80s were "bad," it's just that that's the way it was for working mothers. Women still felt kind of lucky to have a good job in the field, and they didn't dare risk drawing too much attention to the fact that they were also "just moms."
The combination of my parents' natural disdain for sickliness with the realities of my mother's work environment meant that we kids were not able to very often convince our parents that we needed to stay home from school for any reason. In order to get permission to stay home sick, we basically had to be actively bleeding, running a high fever or projectile vomiting (More than once on the vomiting. Once was considered a fluke.) within the 60 minutes immediately preceding morning school departure. Getting my parents to agree to let me stay home sick was akin to arguing a case before the U.S. Supreme Court. It was hard to get them to listen, and even if they decided to hear you out, your odds of success were dicey. And getting my parents' permission to leave school once I was already there for the day would generally require a level of infirmity along the lines of a period of actual unconsciousness during class, or perhaps a grand mal seizure in the cafeteria.
As a result of my parents' draconian position on missing school for illness, I rather predictably veered strongly in the opposite direction when my eldest started kindergarten. My lax sick day policy with my own kids was certainly reactionary, but it was also based on my carefully considered views regarding the way schools are run. I felt (and still do feel) that American children spend too many hours each week in the classroom, and too many hours doing homework, and that they do not get enough time to play or to explore what they do learn in school on their own, outside of class. So for many years - and this was possible mainly because I worked from home almost exclusively during that period - I had no problem with letting my three older kids miss school for even the mildest expression of unwellness, or even when I simply felt that one of them needed a mental health day. And like so many parenting missteps I've made along the way (and from which I like to think I have learned, and continue to learn) I can only say now that, well, it seemed like a good idea at the time!
H, J and E - all 3 legitimately sick at home with a virus a few years ago, all on the same day. They all passed out on top of each other on the futon, like a bunch of sleepy puppies. Note that E is wearing giant gloves. He swore they made him feel better, so he wore them until he was well.
Today, my three older children are 17, 14 and 11, and let's just put it this way: they never miss an opportunity to try to convince me that they are too sick to attend school. My lax position in their early elementary years sort of created sick day monsters. I believe it would be accurate to say that each of them begs to stay home, insisting that he or she is too sick to even get out of bed, at least once in any given two week period. This is despite the fact that over the years, I've had to seriously toughen up on my earlier approach when it became clear at some point that my liberal guidelines were being grievously abused by my offspring. My views have also evolved because it turns out that my parents were correct: if you don't teach children early on that sometimes they just have to power on through, and go do what they are expected to do - despite a little sniffle or headache - the formation of their nascent work ethic will suffer. I get that now, and I've been trying to play catch up with imparting this important lesson to H, J and E ever since I figured it out.
Also, since moving from being a work-at-home mother to a work-at-a-job-outside-the-home mother almost seven years ago, I no longer have the luxury of simply staying home with a child as often or as spontaneously as I used to. That means that any decision to allow one of them to stay home from school is a big decision. Despite my employer's very reasonable policies regarding working parents and sick kids, I have a very busy job with carefully scheduled workdays involving numerous meetings and deadlines. I can't always just drop everything for the day and stay home with one of them, even if my boss would be okay with me working remotely. When a child who wakes up with a fever on a school day, or other legitimate evidence of illness, I have to immediately scramble to call in reinforcements, like my sister and their grandmother, to assist me with the sick kid's care and feeding during the hours I'm on the job. Obviously, an 11 year old, 14 year old and a 17 year old can stay
home by themselves perfectly well when they are sick, and more and more often, that's
what happens. But even at 14,
J prefers strongly to be with a parent, auntie or grandmother when she
isn't feeling well, and I don't feel completely comfortable leaving my 11 year old home alone when he's sick, even though I have no problem doing it when he's well. I try to avoid it.
But even if they can stay home alone now, God forbid that one of them should need to see their pediatrician on the fly during work hours, because that's means major logistical strategy is required. Sometimes Jon is able to handle a last-minute, weekday trip to the pediatrician, but he also works full time, and he has two year old C with him at his office, located 40 minutes away from our house and even further from the kids' schools and pediatrician. This means that his help isn't often the most practical choice.(We are very lucky - knock wood - that C has been the least-sick baby and toddler I've ever met. I can count the number of times she's been sick on one hand, and none of the illnesses lasted more than a day or two, except for one cold when she was just a newborn that stretched out for over a week.)
Because of both the logistical challenges that come with working motherhood, combined with my realization several years ago that I had been inadvertently encouraging flat-out laziness and irresponsibility with my loosey-goosey approach to allowing them to stay home from school, I have tightened up - a lot. Now, I have to be pretty darn sure that the kid in question is likely to make other people sick should he or she leave the house before I allow a school absence. These days, I have a drill-seargeant approach to whiny offspring who decline to immediately get out of bed in the morning. If my now-well-developed spidey senses detect fakery, I have no mercy. Covers are yanked off. My voice is raised. Loud music is turned on. Threats of upcoming weekends spent entirely in bedrooms are freely dispensed. Over time, they have stopped trying to argue about staying home once I make it clear that they won't be doing it, but my earlier parenting error continues to haunt me in the frequency with which they continue to at least try to get me to allow them to miss school.
So what is your position on too-sick-for-school at your house? If you work full time, how do you manage care for a child who really does need to stay home? Is your employer understanding about using your own sick and vacation time to care for a sick child? Tell me how you handle this issue with your own children in the comments below.
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