Children sick, now what?
Yes, but she's right that students can be flexible. We don't have to mess up our children's lives for students in most cases, they don't mind working with us to reschedule a class or review session or even a deadline. I probably wouldn't ask to reschedule an exam, though.
Hi Priorities straight,
It's funny, but after I've had a class for a while I start thinking of them almost as my kids. I worry that someone will have a sports or music conflict with a rescheduled class. Of course, i worried about my sick child (back in the day) more, but it was a real priority with me to take care of my class of kids too, not just drop them when things got tough.
cheers,
Laura
For women in academia, I think a sick child should always take precedence over meeting a class. Students can be quite flexible and they don't mind coming even at night or over the weekend if need be.
Hi Helen,
No wonder. I am glad you had the resources to start your son off with a supportive and loving home.
Wow, I guess I hadn't considered quite how delocalized industry is today. If you have people from different countries working together, it must be a time zone nightmare to get connected even by phone! I remember calling my kids from China when Mike and I were there on the Avery project. Kinda hard to sychronize and that was only two time zones!
Nice that people have developed good ways to make this communication work.
cheers,
Laura
Half the time people are calling in to meetings/seminars from their offices anyway as we're scattered over several continents and many different time zones, so working from home is not so different, especially when you're usually monitoring project progress by phone or email anyway. Agreed Laura that we have a similar hierarchy in my company. The directors have nannies and the rest have daycare. At least we have exceptional daycare on site. That's not an option at all places. We adopted our son and brought him home at 7months. Essentially he spent the first 7 months of his life in 24/7 daycare...we decided we didn't want to bring him to the US for more of the same!
Surely you jest, Laura. Almost as much fun indeed. But it does sound like hmcbride has a very well set-up system for taking care of this problem. Nice that at least some industries "get it" better than academia, although day care centers are getting more common. I haven't heard about calling in to staff meetings,though.
Joan Steitz, one of my biography subjects, told me that in her experience professors sent their small children to daycare and physicians had nannies. I'm glad to hear you have a good nanny, hmcbride, and hope she stays with you a good long time. But staying at home and calling in sounds good too. With Skype it's probably almost as much fun as actually being at a meeting!
cheers,
Laura
We have a nanny and a healthy son, so it's not regularly an issue, but when the nanny is on vacation AND my son is sick, I've had to stay home. Most of the women at my company stay home with their sick kids and call in for important meetings. We're pretty well linked up so that working at home is a viable option. I know that's not true in many places. We also have a referral service for a nurse monitored sick child center in our area. As another poster said, I wouldn't feel comfortable having my not so sick child in with another one with something awful, but this one only accomodates 5 sick children, and each one has their own room. I don't know how many people use that option.
Child care centers can't really help with this issue, although they are valuable. It needs to be done separately, because mothers don't want to send their kids to preschool with a bunch of sick kids.
I don't have children at home to worry about, but I see my female colleagues really struggling with this issue. School or preschool holidays are especially bad because they overload all the excess capacity. Schools should HAVE to provide daycare coverage if they are taking a vacation day. It's fine for them to charge for it, they just should not be able to dump the responsiblity back on the parents.
There is talk about creating a system here where a parent could bring a sick child while she/he lectures. But some of the staff who used to work in child care are creatine roadblock after roadblock. Not that I want us to break the law, but they seem to delight in blocking this help for parents.
No, Laura, this isn't solved, as far as I know. I still struggle with the same issues of what to do when my kids are sick. I haven't taken them to work with me yet, hope I don't have to ever, but I sure wish I had a grandma on hand! Why did we ever give up living in family enclaves?
