How strict are you about your kids going to school when complaining of a malady?

Well, I know my children well enough to “sense” when they are being truthful or not, and I never doubt them when they tell me they “are” sick. When they are ill, I know they are, because like most parents who are close to their kids, I can see when they are well or when they’re not. My kids are only 7 and 5, so at that young age they are pretty easy to gauge. It’s when they turn 13 and beyond, then I’ll have to really look for the truth. Lol.

So I’m not really that strict when it comes to my child’s refusal to go to school because she says she’s sick. I believe her, so I keep her home.

A true story.
When I was a kid, I told my mom I was too sick to go school.
Then, I got up to take a leak. My dad was in the hallway.
He said, “If you can walk, you can go to school”.
I went to school.
By the way, do not bother to dog my (late) dad. He was a cool guy and one of my heroes.

@josie Great story. Your Dad sounds like he had a solid upbringing and hence moral foundation behind him.

I trusted them as older kids but they had to stay in bed, being quiet. Each one went to school in the afternoon once!

Missing school generally means a boatload of make-up work, so mine never wanted to miss because it meant double homework the next night.

We always tried to align family vacations with school vacations. I never took the kids out to go to go on an ordinary vacation, like to the beach or skiing. I have taken them out to go to Washington DC and San Francisco. They might as well have stayed in school. Both trips were filled with museums and cultural/historical points of interest.

My son has tried faking it a few times. I think he knows now that he won’t get away with it. I basically do an assessment for whatever he says is wrong with him. I’ll check his temperature, heart rate, respiratory rate, listen to his heart, lungs, and stomach. I do this so I know what to treat if he’s really sick and decide if he needs to go to the doctor. He also has asthma, so whenever he gets chest colds, his asthma tends to flare up, so I start his breathing treatments.

That being said, when he tried to fake it in the past, I talked to him about it and asked him why he didn’t want to go to school. So far it’s just been because he thinks school is boring, but if he really needed a day off in the future after having a tough week or something, I might let him have a day off (depending on how he is doing in school and what’s going on at school).

As far as vacations, so far we haven’t had a vacation that has taken him out of school, but he has missed school for moving (due to the military) and he did get to miss a few days when my husband was home on leave. I’m not against going on a vacation during the school year. If we were going to do it, I would talk with his teacher before hand and ask her to get some work for him so we could work on it before he went back to school (which is what I did when we took him out during my husband’s leave and what I did when he had to miss a few days after breaking his arm).

It all depends. One child never liked to miss school at all. So whenever he said he was sick, he was really sick. Only got sick one time where he ever missed school.
The other child was sick a lot because of her asthma but we would treat her and send her to school if she seemed to not have a fever or any wheezing or even a sign of a cold.
I would tell her to call me from school if once there she felt ill still. She was lazy about getting up in the morning no matter what time she went to bed. I would say about 99% of the time she got over it at school and never called. I also had a back up plan to make her attend school.
If she was to stay home, there was to be no tv, & no games. She was to only spend her time recovering and her brother would pick up her homework assignments. Also since she was a social butterfly, after school events would be canceled as well until she was well enough to attend school.
Now I only did that for ailments that seemed bogus. She learned soon enough it wasn’t worth staying home unless she was really ill. By the first 3 hours she was eager to go to school. By the next day she was perfectly healthy.
If she was ill, ill, well I would take her to the doctor of course on the same day. And some times I would let her stay home an extra day for good measure but by then she was tired of being away from school and people. I did allow her to have some fun when the ailment was real but she would usually just lay back and watch tv and sleep when she was sick.

I never took them out of school for a week. Mostly because my daughter was asthmatic she would be close or over her 10 days of sick days allowed for school. We always wanted to make sure if she ever had to be out for 2 weeks that it wouldn’t interupt her school attendance to bad and she wouldn’t need to repeat the courses she missed.
Figured , summer and spring and winter vacations where enough time for us to get time away together when we wanted.
Plus never wanted the children to feel that I thought school any less important than work. It was their job to go to school and be on time and present everyday, as it was equally important that we do the same at our jobs so we could provide for them.
I see school as a training ground for responsible behavior that will be expected from them when they are grown.
We teach our children by example and I find parents who are very relax about attendance end up with a kid who doesn’t see school as being important. After all. If its not important to mom and dad than why should they see it as important.

Kid (sorta) here.

I almost never missed school as a kid. I almost never got sick as a kid. Because of this, and because I was such a good student, my mom would give me one or two unofficial days off during the year when she knew I really needed a rest. I never lied to her about being sick because there was no need to. :)

I could tell when my daughter was lying. If I suspected that’s what she was doing, I’d tell her that she could stay off but I’d take her straight to the doctor’s. 9 times out of10 she’d then change her mind and say that she’d be okay going to school. Kids get enough official holidays off school it was never necessary.

I never took her out of school for holidays. I believe there’s a law against doing that in the UK. It certainly wasn’t allowed in any shape or form by the school. Permission for time off would be granted only for medical reasons or family bereavement.

If my kids say they don’t feel well in the morning but they are able to eat breakfast and don’t have a fever or any other symptom, I tell them to try to make it through the day. If they are actually sick, the school will call me to pick them up. Not once have they actually been sick when they’ve had an “I don’t feel good” morning! Like others have said, it’s pretty easy to tell if a kid, especially a young child, is actually sick.

My daughter, who is 11, will sometimes try to get to stay home by saying she feels like she’s going to throw up. She isn’t faking it, she actually feels nauseous, but not from an illness. It comes from realizing she forgot to do something and doesn’t want to get into trouble or get a bad grade. The sick feeling doesn’t last long though because she wakes up so ridiculously early that she always has plenty of time to do what she needs to do!

As for vacations, we’ve only once taken a family trip and timed it for a week the kids had off from school anyway. When I was a kid, we sometimes took a vacation and missed a week of school. It wasn’t a big deal. Some teachers would give me work to do while I was gone, and others would have extra work for me to make up when I got back. The last time we did this, I was in middle school. High school would have been more difficult. I’d try to plan a vacation around school, but I wouldn’t refuse to take a trip just because of that.

The problem for us, now, is that our kids go to two different schools with two different spring breaks. What do we do?

My daughter loves school, so she rarely wanted to stay home. Only if she was really sick. My son tends to get strep throat, so that always has to get treated. Occasionally he’ll act really sick, and we’d want him to be sure, because it meant one of us had to stay home from work. But now he’s old enough to stay home on his own. I don’t think he’s faking it.

He also gets sick at school, and I guess they believe him. They call me to come get him. Sometimes I’ll talk to him and ask if he can hold on until I’m off work, but the school doesn’t like that because he’s hanging out in the lobby all afternoon. Although sometimes he’s gotten better and gone back to class.

@downtide: So what happens if a kid needs to miss school for a religious holiday?

Religious schools get holidays appropriate for their associated religion. Non-religious schools get the normal Christian holidays like Christmas and Easter. I guess if the holidays of a particular religion are important you put your kids into a religious school of the appropriate faith.