When Kids Get Sick, Working Moms Do The Impossible Math
My toddler is stuffy-nosed and feverish, so I cancel the sitter who was supposed to watch him during my virtual meeting. It would be rude to expose her to a cold.
Which means I’ll take the meeting with my toddler in the background. I don’t have a choice — it’s a meeting I can’t miss. Maybe he’ll sleep. Or play quietly through it.
Wishful thinking.
When 1:00 p.m. rolls in, he’s clingy and wide awake, so I take the meeting outside, hoping that fresh air in nature will buy me an hour. “Hi, I just want to flag that my toddler will be in the background today,” I begin. “He’s sick, and I had to cancel my sitter.”
I’m assured it’s fine. Still, when the toddler starts fussing at minute 50, I mute my mic, my stomach winding into a tight knot. I feel wildly unprofessional.
My husband works at a school and can’t easily get coverage, so as a freelancer working from home, the sick-day math often lands on me. Even if our roles were reversed, I have a feeling I’d still be trying to rearrange my schedule to make the pediatrician appointment, play the nurse role, and work with the feverish toddler on my lap.
Is it biology? Social conditioning? The way my kids instinctively search for me when they don’t feel well? Or is it that I’ve embraced the mom role so hard that my children don’t accept their father’s care in moments like these? Maybe it’s all of it.
I’m not alone.
A Genexa survey of 1,000 U.S. moms found that 70% use their own sick days to stay home when their child is ill, and 58% work from home while caregiving. In other words, many of us are doing the same impossible math: caring for sick kids while trying to keep our work lives moving.
As mothers, we tend to blame ourselves for their endless illnesses — for not giving them enough Vitamin D, or forgetting to make them wash their hands before eating, or letting them play at that grimy playplace.
But the truth is, kids just get sick. A lot.
In fact, according to Mayo Clinic Press, kids can have as many as 12 colds per year. And public health officials say this year’s cold and flu season is among the worst in decades, meaning longer recoveries and more cancelled childcare for moms.
We’re living in a system that requires caretakers, especially women, to “absorb impossible demands,” Anne Welsh, a clinical psychologist and executive coach, tells me. “Mothers are asked to mother like they don’t work and work like they don’t mother ... it’s an impossible bind.”
I wanted to understand why this keeps happening and why it feels so personal, so I turned to the experts.
Why am I the one rearranging everything?
The often unspoken cultural belief is that, yes, mothers are better at caregiving, Welsh informs me: “Better at comforting. Better at soothing. Better at knowing what to do.”
With that belief, mothers tend to seek out jobs that offer flexibility. “Over time, that flexibility becomes the rationale for why they should be the one to step in again,” she says.
Parents also cling to the idea that their sick child should be tucked into bed with homemade soup and a doting mother nearby, adds Dawn Friedman, a clinical counselor and parent educator. But throughout history, parents have had to work, and it hasn’t doomed children.
What has suffered, however, is a mother’s sense of fairness.
“Mothers are asked to mother like they don’t work and work like they don’t mother.”
Parents rarely have explicit conversations about who will handle sick care, says Olivia Bergeron, a psychotherapist and parent coach. She says moms step up, but this often comes with resentment towards their partners, guilt about being a distracted employee, and shame about not being able to “do it all.”
Bergeron shares a familiar mental loop: It's so unfair that my partner didn't even offer to stay home. Then: What kind of mother doesn't want to stay home with her sick child? And finally, I'm an awful mother for having these thoughts and feelings.
So, what’s a mother to do?
Make a “cope ahead” plan — have conversations before illness hits about who will stay home, how work will be handled, and what backup options exist, Bergeron recommends. Fathers are capable caregivers, she emphasizes, and plans should honor both parents’ work and well-being.
For single mothers who don’t have access to backup care, it just means that sick days become that much more isolating and exhausting. Bergeron recommends getting creative by identifying potential helpers in the community, including family, friends, babysitters, and even nannies on loan from other families.
And then there are other realities we have to find workarounds for, too.
Trying to work from home with a sick kid is a special kind of hell.
It’s rarely simple. You get the call to pick up the kid early, whisk them off to the pediatrician, pick up the meds, and still make it home in time for the 3:00 p.m. Zoom board meeting.
How do you do it without losing your mind?
Remember what anchors you, says Blanka Molnar, a parenting coach and holistic therapist. That might look like a playlist of favorite songs, moving your body, drinking a good cup of coffee or tea, journaling, or deep breathing to calm your nervous system. These small, microdosed moments of joy can ground us and help us to keep our cool, Molnar says.
It’s also appropriate to set boundaries with your work and let them know you’ll have limited availability on sick-care days. She recommends focusing on one task at a time rather than working yourself into a frazzled exhaustion.
Perhaps, most importantly, lower your expectations on these days. “Start with yourself. If you try to stick rigidly to high standards, you will break,” Molnar cautions.
You use all your PTO... and then you get sick too.
Here’s a familiar scenario: You nurse your child back to health, only to catch the bug yourself.
For parents with chronic conditions, such as cancer, diabetes, and heart disease, the stakes are even higher. Three in four American adults have at least one chronic condition, and many rely on immunocompromising medications that can turn a simple cold into weeks of missed work or even hospitalization.
Hilary Hodge, a mother living with two diseases, knows this reality firsthand. She now coaches parents on ways to reduce their chances of getting sick.
Her advice includes:
- Asking children to wash their hands as soon as they get home
- Wearing a mask during close contact when kids are actively ill
- Encouraging kisses on your hair or the back of the head instead of your face
- Running an air purifier with a HEPA filter, and opening windows when weather allows
But sometimes, when you do everything “right,” you still fall ill. And just as you start to recover, another family member comes down with something new and nasty.
We can’t win, can we?
That’s the point.
Cold and flu season is a “magnified version of working motherhood at all times: that ambition paradox of wanting to excel in both spaces while operating in a system that isn't set up for that…there’s no margin. There’s just constant triage,” says Welsh.
Kids will keep getting sick. Meetings will keep getting scheduled. And somewhere, another mother will be doing the impossible math of working motherhood, muting her mic while her feverish toddler fusses beside her.
source https://www.scarymommy.com/parenting/working-moms-sick-kids-mental-load
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