A Plague Tale: Parental Sick Leave

This is a story of betrayal. A betrayal of trust. A betrayal in my own home. A betrayal by my own blood.

My son started nursery last week and after only 3 days of attendance, he got sick. I always knew that nurseries were hotbeds for infection but I could never have anticipated the speed of contagion. More of a nursery for disease.

Luckily, my wife and I have the luxury to work from home. We both stayed home with him because I’ve got hours to meet and she’s got meetings and calls many times a day so she looked after him most of the time while I took him when she has meetings. Alas, 2 days into him being ill and I started to feel something in my chest, a foreign weight, I knew it was the beginnings of infection but Didi insisted it’s a placebo from him snotting and coughing everywhere. Another 2 days after passed and I most definitely caught the lurgy and so had she. My symptoms were a chesty cough and sore throat.

This experience got me thinking.

Some parents are forced to send sick babies/children to nursery, as they can’t have the day off work. This causes their sick child to then spread sickness to other children and potentially the parents of those children too. It’s human dominoes. You then get a greater hit to the productive and economic output of the area than if the parents of the original child, patient zero, had had sufficient support to stay home with their sick child.

There needs to be policy in place to support parents of infants when they’re sick, such as an extension of paid sick leave, even at 80% like the furlough programs and the employer can claim this back. Policy such as this would be better for all.

Yes, children will get sick and you can’t protect them from everything and it’s better that they do as it helps build the immune system but knowingly and wantonly exposing them is unnecessary.

Now we must sent him back to nursery this week, while he is still not quite over his illness, we had no choice. We can’t have another week like the last. Didi missed a few calls, had to postpone meetings and my employer subscribes to Presenteeism (a topic which I will explore in the future) and I’ve not shown face in over a week.

So now our son will most likely be the reason why another child will catch the lurgy and pass it into their parents. It’s like a shitty pass-the-parcel.