What happens when you work, and your child gets sick?

I’m hoping companies will get more and more flexible about work hours and about working from home for EVERYONE. Of course it depends what industry you are in whether this is feasible. It seems to me that anyone who does most of their work on the phone or on a computer should be able to work from home in general, saves gas and companies would need fewer offices.

I do think companies should allow infants to come with mothers to work, even if there is not a day care. If the baby is breast feeding and mostly sleeping all day, and the mother has a private office and can still get her work done with no problem why forbid it? Especially when the baby is very young. Day care at the work facility is great also.

PS: teenagers have more complications when they have tonsilectomies compared to young children, try to avoid it if possible.

@JLeslie And adults have more complications than children and teens combined with tonsillectomies. Worst experience of my life was having tonsils out at 24.

@JLeslie Just how is she ment to work with a young baby screaming in her earhole, surely that idea is just counter productive hopefully thats the correct word to use Lets just make it so the kids are only ill when you have time off work, like holidays and during the normal sick days you get allotted god forbid someone gets ill when you have used all sick days .

@sandystrachan I did not mean a sick kid. Keep your sick kids at home, no one wants their germs in the office. I meant a healthy infant. Or, am I misundedrstanding your statement? If your kid is sick and you have used up your sick time and vacation time, then I hope your employer will let you work from home, otherwise I guess you get time off without pay. But, even if I don’t have kids I want the same option, that is all I am saying.

My sister in law has an agreement with her employer that she will work flexible hours, as long as they don’t interfere with the health of her children. She has two with chronic health problems, and her elderly parents frequently need her help. The employer is so glad she has agreed to come back to the office, he are willing to let her work flexible hours.

@JLeslie Breastfeeding and nappy changing oh and the infant being too hot and bored , yet you still want that infant to be taking into work . Not only would is disrupt the parents work but all those around her , If your boss wont let you work from home take that up with your boss .

I take dependent care sick leave and stay home with my child.

Mary Poppins flies down the chimney

@sandystrachan- Not if you have an HMO, she doesn’t.

@AstroChuck Dumbass time , whats HMO

HMO

Where I have worked in the past, it was one of two ways. For an hourly pay position, you use your own sick/personal/vacation days to stay home with a sick child. If you used up those days, mostly you stayed home without pay – though smaller businesses are more likely to let you make up the hours somehow. For a salaried position, you take off with pay to stay home. However, you are also expected to work overtime without additional pay – and that is a much more frequent occurrence than time off with pay.

For most of my kids lives I have been a stay-at-home mom, which means I could never take a sick day because I was ill. In all the years I’ve been a stay-at-home mom, I think my ex-husband took one day off to care for the kids when I was sick.

I like what my current employer offers. Everyone gets 140 paid hours per year. You can use it for whatever you want, no questions asked, so long as you alert them in advance (which could be a phone call that morning). So I use 99% of this for my daughter.

When I have an appointment outside of work, I take it without pay.

When I’m sick, I go to work sick. I have gone to work with a 102-degree temperature, hacking phlegm everywhere.

Now I would much rather have saved some of my PTO for me, but my kid comes first. As I said in the other thread, it sucks, but I chose to become a parent.

Also, none of this delays any work deadlines – so work has to be done regardless. Meaning, after staying home with a sick munchkin all day, I’m then staying up until 2AM to catch up on the day’s work -between germ sharing daughter and lack of sleep, I’m almost guarenteed to get sick -but I’m off to work.

It’s a vicious cycle. The good news is she’ll be eighteen in only eleven years. :^\

The company’s sick-time policy should apply to both the employee him/herself, as well as any family member that employee has to care for. Mine does. We get 10 sick days per year. The policy explicitly states that an employee may use sick-time to care for themselves and/or a sick parent or dependent.

If the parent needs to be out longer than the number of sick days they get, they’re going to have to ask for unpaid leave while they care for the child.

Both of the jobs I had after becoming a parent had the same kind of policy. If you child is sick, you use your sick time, vacation time, or personal days. After that, the time is unpaid. Neither of the jobs had any possibility of working from home, and both had limited ways to work a longer day. Both required a doctor’s note if you missed three or more days due to an illness.

Honestly, the hardest time I had with both of my kids was right after taking maternity leave. I came back from leave both times with no paid days available. My husband has his own business, which is the primary source of our income. My job always provided benefits and a bit of extra money. It was rare for him to be able to take a day off on short notice, so caring for sick children was mainly my responsibility. We didn’t have family members who were retired or even working part-time to help when the kids were sick. Usually as the kids got older they got sick less often, but that first year and a half to two years was rough. My kids were basically very healthy, just catching normal childhood illnesses. I can’t imagine being a working parent with a chronically ill child.

If my mother in law didn’t work, I’m sure she’d be happy to take care of a sick child now and then while I worked. I wouldn’t like to take advantage of that though, and I would feel pretty bad about leaving her with a child that’s throwing up or has a high enough fever to be constantly miserable. The way I look at it is, they’re my kids. It’s part of my job to take care of them when they’re sick, and I wouldn’t want someone else to do it. It sure made work difficult at times, but that’s just part of having kids and working full time.

You said: This question is sparked by TinyFaery’s question about parents with children getting preferential treatment at work with respect to time off to care for sick children.

Ya, having to deal with a sick child is a real perk!
My wife is stay-at-home, so this was rarely an issue. We had hepatitus A go thru the house years ago, and everyone else got sick. I went to work several days, but occasionally had to stay home to take care of EVERYONE. There is no policy for this, but my boss was very understanding, and gave me sick leave, I think.

A lot of companies don’t have enough sick/personal time available to their employees. It should be adequate. I don’t think that people with kids should just be given more sick time or anything. But perhaps they could implement some sort of program where extra personal/sick time can be bargained- open for anyone needing it, not just those with sick kids. I think it should be decided on a case by case basis. That way if this is the 9th time the mom or dad has asked to be off to take care of a 17 year old kid, it can be ruled as unnecessary. Just as sick time for a non-parent can be allotted, and suspicion of just playing hooky can be ruled against.

Again, I went on a tangent and was talking about a healthy baby, young baby, in the beginning, so a mother does not have to leave her 6 week old at home or with someone else if she must get back to work, but the consensus seems to be that it is ridiculous to even think it, so I will believe all of you and go along.

Someone above said they use up all of their sick time for their kids and then drag themselves into work super sick with 102. That is very annoying to me, because I don’t want to catch your 102 fever. I’ll say it again, I think employers need to be more flexible, some are, if the work is getting done it shouldn’t matter much where and when. In some jobs this is impossible, but many it is possible.

I feel like people are inetrpreting my words as against parents, just the opposite, I want them to be accomadated by their employer to be able to be with their children, especially when sick, I just think everyone should get the same perks. If Sally can come in early and leave early on Thursdays because her child has a class she takes him to, then I want to be able to come in early some days also, even if it is to take an aeorbics class for myself. If Sally has a sick child, let her work from home, hell if Sally is sick or I am sick let me work from home if we are able.

It all depends where you’re employed. Some places are much more lenient than others. At my last job at a collection agency I remember that a lot of the managers gave parents a very hard time about missing work for their children and I never agreed with that. My one friend got called at work a few times by her child’s daycare stating he was sick and needed to be picked up. She was a single parent and had no choice but to leave. She didn’t receieve any pay for the rest of that day and was expected to make up all the hours she missed by the end of the week. And keep in mind the manager made sure to make her feel quite guilty for having to leave at all. I think it’s ridiculous that employers expect it’s employees to put work before their family. We’re only human and sometimes situations pop up that need to be handled.

The appropriate and fair thing looks like this.

Every employee gets some bank of sick time, personal time, and vacation time. When the employee is sick, or has to care for a sick dependent or parent, they get to take the time out of that bank. If they run out of time in that bank, they can still take the time off, but it’s unpaid.

This does mean that people with sickly children spend their vacation time caring for the children instead of taking two weeks and going to Disneyworld, but hey, them’s the breaks. They also spend more on antibiotics and bleach, but it’s not reasonable to expect their coworkers to contribute to the cost of those as well.

Also, for other circumstances, there are things like maternity or paternity leave, short-term disability, and leaves of absence. I don’t think it’s ridiculous for a mother to want to spend more than six weeks at home with her newborn, but I do think it’s ridiculous to expect the employer to continue paying her beyond that.

This is close to what my current employer does. The principal difference is that there is no sick time bank, but if you’re out for three days in a row, you need a doctor’s note. And if you take too much sick time, your manager can bring it up with HR, and they will notify you that for the next several months any sick time will come out of vacation time or be unpaid time off, at your option.

And I agree with @JLeslie that employers need to be flexible with everyone. What pisses me off is not that Fred gets to leave early to pick his kid up from daycare; what pisses me off is when a boss lets Fred have flexible hours to take care of his commitments outside of work, but doesn’t let me have flexible hours to take care of my commitments outside of work, when the only material difference is that Fred’s commitments involve kids and mine don’t.

No one keeps time at my work. There’s an official timekeeping system, but my boss can’t be bothered to enter my time. So I always have the full allotment of vacation time allowable, and my sick time keeps on increasing without any deductions.

Of course what this means is that I probably don’t take my full allotment of vacation. I hardly ever take sick days, either. When the kids were younger, I took more. In any case, I have, so far, never had a problem when I wanted to take time off. My boss hardly ever looks in on how I’m doing, so I’m, for practical purposes, my own boss.

I’m pretty lucky, but there is a downside of not being held accountable for anything. When I’m not self-motivated, I spend all my time of fluther, but I feel conflicting feelings about my doing my official work, and doing my chosen work (which is fluther). I keep thinking it’ll all collapse on me some day, and I’ll have to pay the piper. A little bit of anxiety knawing at me.

[Mod Says] Please keep this non-personal and on topic. Further posts referring directly to individuals will be removed.

Sandy says : that is the whole point of the discussion , to direct it towards someone

I’d say use your own sick days, vacation days, etc, and if you have no more, then go home with no pay. Just because you made the personal decision to have children doesn’t mean you deserve more sick time than I do. If you feel you need more, don’t use up so much of your vacation time.

Telling someone they’re a crybaby Is not conducive to debate.

When I worked for someone else, employees with sick children used their comp time first, then sick leave, followed by vacation leave, and then brokered some sort of work-from-home agreement if it were a long-term illness such as cystic fibrosis.

Some folks used all their leave even without having children to get sick. Some folks (like me) had kids who got sick sometimes but still had leave saved up primarily by sacrificing. Those with kids didn’t take long vacations.

And then some of my coworkers brokered flex-hours or work-from-home arrangements for other reasons, not because they had sick kids but because some other aspect of family life required it.

However, if you were supposed to be at work 40 hours a week, from 8 to 5, but you wanted flex-hours so you could work a second job or so you could go water skiing, then flex-time and work-from-home was not an option. However, resigning was.

@Darwin: whereas my current company is more than happy to allow for flex-time arrangements and telecommuting arrangements for childcare or for water skiing.

My chain of bosses, all the way up to the top, cares that the work gets done and the employees are happy—because they’ve figured out that happy employees get more work done. They’re actually remarkably flexible on things that don’t affect the quality of the work or whether the work gets done—such as flextime and telecommuting.

@Darwin from the job perspective, what is the difference between being away from work for a child or for water skiing? Either way you are not working.

There is actually quite a bit of debate about this matter in politics. People are trying to fight for better maternity leave laws, citing laws in European countries that are much more liberal. The opposition of course says that it would hurt business owners and hurt women in the end.

Also, recently Claire Shipman and Katty Kay wrote a book called Womenomics that addresses changes in the workplace regarding flexibility. I have not read the book yet. http://familiesandwork.org/blog/2009/06/14/talking-womenomics-with-claire-shipman-and-katty-kay/

When a person is away on vacation, I think it is a mistake to think they are not working. And I don’t mean doing all your email on your Blackberry or whatever. Research says that workers who take vacations are much more productive. They are recharging their batteries, and who knows what good ideas they will come back from vacation with.

Similarly, I have no idea what I’m going to learn on fluther. I could be seen as wasting my company’s time. In my experience, doing speculative “work” like goofing off has turned out to be quite useful to my employer. Maybe not right away, and maybe never, but some things gained from goofing off have been very valuable.

I think work should be seen in a much more wholistic manner. It’s not about buying someone’s time, and then controlling them as much as possible. It’s about paying them to borrow their energy and ideas, and letting them be free to imagine and improve. We can easily train people not to think. In my mind, this is a waste of human resources.

@JLeslie – I worked for a governmental body that was restrained by laws that said flex-time, etc., was available at the boss of bosses’ discretion but never for non-health related items, with health-related being defined specifically as medical issues for yourself, your children or a family member living with you.

The law did not include water skiing or similar endeavors as a medical issue, and some bosses were less inclined than others to grant exceptions. Working an additional job was defined legally as a conflict of interest because the job would have had to be either in the private sector, thus affecting your judgment in carrying out a governmental job, or it would be for another governmental body, also a conflict of interest.

Folks were indeed allowed to be on vacation as long as they had vacation leave available, and as long as those in my position were cognizant of the fact that we were on call 24/7.

@Darwin I agree with not being able to work in a competing business. I grew up in the land of gov’t, Washington D.C., my parents both worked for the gov’t. My mother in her last job before she retired was able to use maxi-flex hours, which if I remember correctly meant arriving between 6:00 and 9:00 a.m. and then leaving after an 8 hour day. She went in VERY early and left early so she could swim every evening before coming home. Some people adjusted their hours for their children’s needs, but in the end no one asked why you were working the hours you were working. The government does it for practical traffic reasons, DC is very congested, and I guess also for the convenience of employees. It might have been that managers had the ability to allow or not allow such flexible hours, I’m not sure.

@JLeslie – I was one of the managers and this was not the Federal government. There are in place laws that restrained what folks were allowed to do in terms of flex time and time off.

@Darwin I’ll have to ask her, maybe my understanding of it was incorrect. I know she did not have this flexibility when she worked at NCI and neither did my dad at HHS/NIMH, but this is how I remember it when she worked at FDA. I’ll have to ask her to clarify. I also had a girlfriend who worked for NST who went to a four day work week, was paid less, but still had her benefits, and did basically the same job as when she was 5 days.

@JLeslie – As I said, it was not the Feds and it isn’t Federal law that affects flex-time and work from home rules. Remember, we have states and cities that have governments and laws, too. As long as they don’t conflict with Federal laws, almost anything goes.

@Darwin Now I see what you are saying. I agree. I was misunderstanding. I was just saying that even a place like the federal government has shown flexibility, and I think of gov’t as being bureaucratic and inflexible many times. I was just giving an example of a workplace that was flexible, I in now way meant it was a law, it was just a policy that particular division had. The point was really to emphasize again that there are employers that will let you control your time no matter what the reason, for personal fun time or a child’s needs.