Hope this helps.

Working together we can make a difference.
-- Cathy Feldman

Up until recently, I never had to stay home with a sick child because I had a live-in. After a pretty awful au-pair experience this summer, we switched to a local mom who lives out. She comes to me for an hour in the morning and returns from 3-6 pm. She is ALWAYS on-call if one of the kids gets sick, (and on school vacations) and is the emergency contact at the school (it would take me over an hour to get home in an emergency!)

I think it's really important to think about back-up care, so you don't have to use up sick time. I have a few ex-babysitters who I keep in touch with, who are around during the day, and who I can call in an emergency, as well as my mother, who lives a mile a way, and is occasionally able to help out in a crunch. I am probably luckier than most.

Even so, I've had to miss a day or two of work. Yes, it's usually me and not my husband, although he is self-employed and would not "lose" any time. Better not to expose him, because he's the worst of them all when he is sick! When possible, I ask my boss for a work-at-home day rather than a sick day. I also have a lot of working friends with similar situations, so if the kids are not contagious and for some reason the babysitter is unavailable, I can have my boys to go to (separate) friends houses.

There's no doubt in my mind that many working parents are forced to send their sick children to school as a result of lack of back-up care. Home alone, though? Guess it depends on the age

-- Sharir

When my eldest son, was in day care, if it was a one day thing, I just had to miss a day at work (I was a single mom at the time). If it looked like it was going to be a few days, and I couldn't afford the time away from work, I could usually talk my mom into staying with him.

When he was in about third grade, I started letting him stay home by himself - if it was not an illness with fever, etc. - as my office was nearby, and I could leave several times during the day to check on him. This arrangement worked well for the most part, as he knew I was less than five minutes away, and could be there to help him out.

With my younger son, I have a nanny in my home, and therefore she can stay with him when he is ill. However, the hospital down the road near my office has a day care center staffed by nurses called "Sniffles and Sneezes" which takes sick kids that have a fever below 103 or are sick with contagious illnesses that their regular day care centers won't take. It's kind of pricey, but for the constant care of a full nursing staff, fully equipped beds and facilities, isolation rooms for those that are contagious and the knowlege that my child is in professional hands, is worth it, in my opinion. Sometimes, you just can't take another day from work, and a facility like this is worth it's weight in gold!

-- Lisa W

If you're afraid of losing your job, and your child is sick and needs you at home, you're between a rock and a hard place - a no-win situation. What to do???.

Here are some suggestions of how we might be able minimize this terrible conflict:

1. Keep illness to a minimum - make sure the kids are HEALTHY, with a strong immune system, with a healthy nutrition etc. Also be an informed consumer of medical care. Know how to make the common cold into a one day event rather than a one week event. But childhood illnesses such as chicken pox are a fact of life, they need to run their course. And there's always that little tommyache which may not be real, but the child's need for a little extra TLC is. Sending sick children to school is counter productive, just spreads the illness and forces even more parents to stay home with their sick children.

2. As much as we mothers prefer to take care of our sick children by ourselves, we really need to insist that the FATHERS participate. If a mother takes time off to take care of her sick child, then has to take even more time off when she gets sick herself, that's a double whammy. It's too heavy a burden. It also works against women in the workplace. Although statistically, women have no more absences than men, there is the common misconception that if you hire a women with children, you run the risk of a lot of sick days.

3. This is where the VILLAGE comes in really handy - it's so important to have people in your life that the child is used to being around, someone s(he) is comfortable with nursing them when they're sick.

4. Last but not least, we really need to change ATTITUDES in the workplace. In my opinion, the only way to do that, is to make sure that fathers stay home with sick children at least 50% of the time... making it a PARENT issue rather than a MOTHER issure.

-- Liv F

Typically, if one of the kids is sick we stay home with them. We try to alternate whenever possible but because my husband manages people and projects and I don't it's usually easier for me to miss a day. I always get the calls from school because I'm 20 minutes away and my husband is over an hour away. I probably miss at least 5 days (or partial days) due to sick kids.

When the school nurse called on Thursday I said I'd be there as soon as I could and when I hung up I knew I couldn't walk into my supervisor's office and say I was leaving early, again. I really felt like I was going to have a heart attack - I know it was just anxiety but it was awful. I ended up picking my daughter up from school and bringing her into my office (which she thought was cool). Her pediatrician has several offices one of which is near where I work so I took her into that office rather than the one near our house. She has an ear infection. I know that a lot of this stress is self-inflicted but I hate the thought of being looked at as less reliable because of my children though my employers have always been understanding.

-- Nancy D

Half the reason I got a nanny is because there is no way that I can stay home every time my son is sick (as a physician it would mean disrupting the lives and appointments of upwards of twenty to thirty patients per day). And since I'm single and also have no nearby family, there's nobody else to play team tag with.

So the short answer is: when my son is sick the nanny stays with him. No problem.

The problem, of course, is when the nanny is sick (or gets snowed in), which happens about half a dozen times per year.

I have several backup plans and am always trying to augment them. Sometimes I can share the nanny of one of my co-workers. My other alternatives are commerical daycares which take kids on a space-available drop-in basis. Unfortunately you can rarely get an answer from them before 8:00 am, so that makes me late. It's also expensive, but by that point I Like Totally Don't Care. As a friend of mine once said, "The later you are for work the less money matters."

I tried to find family daycares in my neighborhood who could take my son once in a while for me when this happens. Three in a row said No. They said it was too hard on toddlers to have new kids come and go, and too hard on the new kid.

-- Cathy W

My husband and I alternate. We also try (don't always succeed) to coordinate our schedules so that I don't have important meetings at the same time he's traveling, etc., so if illness does come up, it doesn't create a huge headache at work.

Last year my husband and I missed about 3 days each caring for our sick daughter.

-- Jill M

My husband and I split the day. He stays home in the morning and goes to work in the afternoon. I work mornings, but leave an hour early so that Mark can get to work before noon.

-- Mary P

When our kids get sick, either I or my husband stays home, and we try to trade off, depending on what our schedules are like. If they are sick for more than one day, we still decide based on who can afford more to stay home.

I have brought my daughter into work when she was not seriously ill. This has only happened a few times, though, usually when I am only working out of my office and have no scheduled meetings and don't have to leave her alone.

My kids aren't old enough to be left home alone yet.

My husband's schedule is more flexible than mine, and he actually has lost more days than I to sick kids. I, on the other hand, have left work in the middle of the day several times to get the kids because once he is on the road, he is inaccessible. I am the phone number on the yellow emergency card.

My neighbors have been a great help in getting my sick kids from school if I can't get there right away, but I only ask them to pick them up if I can't get there absolutely right away. This kind of allows me to buy time to get home.

A major determining factor at our house is who decides if the kid is really sick. I had to be practically dying to be kept home from school as a kid. My husband's mom kept him home for just a sniffle, though. So I'm less apt to keep my kids home if I think they can make it through a school day. He is more apt to keep them home for what are more often minor things, like a stomachache or a minor sore throat, or vague whining.

All in all, I think my husband has lost maybe 8 days all of 1997. I've lost about 6, I think. Both kids spent their early years in day care and have had most of the big childhood diseases. They really don't get sick that often.

My original day care was run by a pediatrician who offered sick child care. Evidently this was too costly, though, and he got out of the business. It was a great boon to my attendance, though, for the period of time he owned it--I almost never took time off for fevers, ear infections and stuff like that. The only thing he felt was that a kid should be out for chicken pox, or for when they were feeling absolutely miserable sick that they needed extra TLC from mom.

-- Nancy M

Typically what happens is that my husband and I try to split the day: one of us goes in very early (before 7) and comes home at lunch time; the other goes in at lunch time and stays late. I can work at home some. My husband can take a mildly ill child into the office for an hour or two. There are some exceptions. Occasionally one of us has something that we can't miss and the other stays home all day. When my husband started a new job last year, we agreed that I'd do all the sick child care his first 3 months at the new job.

My employer provides sick-child-care and even picks up 80% of cost. But, the last time I checked, it seemed to have limited use. You had to give 24 hours notice. The caregiver could not administer any medicine, not even Tylenol or prescription antibiotics with a physicians note.

-- Anne H

We use a variety of options. My husband and I stay home based on workload/activity: i.e. if there is no outside customer coming in, my husband stays at home.

We have done the "split the day" thing but find it is a hassle with the commute.

My employer also has 2 options for me:

• in-home sick child care
• sick child care center