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Is it OK to send my child to school if she’s feeling ill?

Sending poorly pupils to school is the only option for many working parents, reports Tanith Carey - Stockbyte
Sending poorly pupils to school is the only option for many working parents, reports Tanith Carey - Stockbyte

It’s 7.30am on a deadline-packed work day and your child wakes up with a streaming cold and a light fever. Your partner is ­already on his way to a business breakfast and your parents live too far away, and are far too busy even if they could get to you in time. You’ve got just under two hours to get into the office and no back-up plan. What do you do?

According to a recent survey, most of us would dose kids up with Calpol, tell them they’ll feel better soon and make a run for it after dropping them off in the playground. A thousand parents were surveyed on behalf of hygienic hand drier Sterillo, and 63 per cent ­admitted sending their sick children to school – even though they might have a contagious illness.

In a further poll by GP service Push Doctor, six out of 10 parents cited workload pressures for sending kids into school when they were not well. A third said they couldn’t afford to take the day off because they needed to be seen to be doing their job by their bosses and colleagues.

It’s a dilemma Vicki Laurie says she has faced several times with her daughters, Daisy, six, and Olivia, three. ­Laurie, 40, a property manager who lives in Earlsfield, south-west London, says: “It’s a fine line. On the two days I work from home I don’t have my nanny, so if the children don’t go in to school I can’t get any work done.

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Vicki Laurie with her daughters Daisy and Olivia

“Obviously, if they have chickenpox or are very teary and crotchety and Calpol has not helped, then I’ll keep them at home. But to be honest – and it’s awful to say it – if I can mask the symptoms and send them in, then I will.”

The growth of the freelance economy has also placed an extra financial pressure on parents who can’t afford to take a day off to look after a poorly child. It’s one of the reasons that at the start of every school year, Vicky Hall Newman, a fragrance adviser, takes Tilly, her seven-year-old daughter, for a flu jab. If she takes time off, she doesn’t get paid.

During the past six years, Hall Newman, 44, from Canterbury, Kent, who writes the blog Being Tilly’s Mummy, can still count the five days she has taken off to care for her daughter. “I keep her off school if she is actually vomiting. If she has a cold then I dose her up with Calpol and send her in. Financially, it’s very difficult ­because if I take a day off it means that I lose a day’s wages. It’s the economy we live in.”

There’s a fear of losing our jobs, or missing out on career opportunities in organisations where an ethos of ‘if you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen’ still rules

Indeed, even when someone is a full-time employee, there is “no obligation” for bosses to pay employees when they have to suddenly take time off to look after their kids, according to Ilana Swimer, employment lawyer at Keystone Law. However, employees can use up their paid holiday entitlement.

Averil Leimon, a leadership psychologist at executive coaching firm White Water Group, says there are many reasons that today’s working parents try as hard as possible not to take a day off – even though a sick child pulls at every heartstring. Despite “lots of nice talk about employees’ well-being and stress”, as well as family-friendly working practices, Leimon says we live in a business world “where resilience at any cost is seen as the ultimate virtue”.

“There’s a fear of losing our jobs, or missing out on career opportunities in organisations where an ethos of ‘if you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen’ still rules. In this atmosphere, employees’ children are still supposed to be invisible.”

sick child - Credit: Paul Bradbury/OJO Images RF
Fever pitch: Working parents often can’t take time off easily Credit: Paul Bradbury/OJO Images RF

Another reason parents may feel they can’t stay at home with a sick child is that many companies are “so lean they are anorexic” so there’s no one to pick up the slack if you don’t show up, adds ­Leimon.

Parents also worry that bosses and colleagues will see them as having failed for not having a back-up system in place, even though many parents no longer have extended family to step in. “Granny could well be off skydiving, not sitting around to do the babysitting,” says Leimon.

Panicking parents can take desperate measures. Lisa Jarmin, 39, an education writer who was a primary school teacher for six years, recalls occasions where parents went to extremes to ­lever their sick children into classes.

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“There was one mum who mentioned to the office staff that her child had spots that looked like chickenpox. She was asked to take the child home, but she dropped her in a different part of the school and ran away, turning her phone off.” Other teachers tell of ­parents swabbing their children’s ­conjunctivitis-infected eyes outside school to get rid of telltale clues..

But until family-friendly working really happens, for now “Mummy, I’m too ill to go to school” has become one of the most feared sentences for working parents – and some children with clammy foreheads and streaming noses won’t get the recuperation time they need.

As Laurie points out: “When we were younger, our mums were at home, not working.” She says most of today’s working parents have had to make the same call, so can sympathise. “If another parent sends their child into school sick, I wouldn’t be annoyed unless it was something serious, like measles. Children can catch coughs and colds from anywhere.”