Those Darn Kids Sure Get in the Way

Today my six-year-old son is home sick. According to The Shriver Report, this is a wholly unfair circumstance in which I find myself. After all, parents have to work, and they need a place to put their kids when they get sick. I got a phone call about this very issue from Good Housekeeping earlier this year. They wanted some advice they could give their readers about what working moms can do when they're faced with this situation. (Apparently this editor hadn't done sufficient research about me and my work.)

I can tell you what I didn't say, though. I didn't say it's the government's responsibility (aka the taxpayers' responsibility) to offer working parents a solution to this dilemma. (GH never did print my answer, by the way. No surprise there...) But that's precisely what the Left wants. Remember this quote from John Podesta in The Shriver Report?

Schools still let kids out in the afternoon, long before the workday ends, and they shut their doors for three months during the summer, even though the majority of families with children are supported by a single working parent or a dual-earning couple.

They forgot to include the "what to do when kids get sick" in this particular sentence, but you'll find it later in the 450-page report. Indeed, by the time feminists are finished getting what they want from the government, there won't be any mothering left for them to do. Which is not a problem for them, since that's precisely what they want. Abortion on demand and government-run day care removes that little problem of babies getting in the way of one's career goals.

Kids being home sick is only a problem for parents whose priorities are out of whack. Taking care of sick children is part of what it means to be a parent. It's up to parents, not the government, to figure out how to tend to children when they're ill. The idea that I should be able to take my son someplace else when he's got a fever and is coughing all over the place is rather shocking, when you think about it. I mean, at the very least it isn't very nice. At worst, it gets other people sick.

Sick kids are a bona fide problem for working parents, I admit. Nevertheless, it's up to them to figure out a plan.

6 Responses to “Those Darn Kids Sure Get in the Way”:

  1. Bob H. says:

    What exactly is the definition of a parent?

  2. Anonymous says:

    No shit!

  3. Anonymous says:

    You contradict yourself:

    "Kids being home sick is only a problem for parents whose priorities are out of whack."

    "Sick kids are a bona fide problem for working parents, I admit."

    Furthermore... yeah, it's a huge problem if you don't have any/enough sick days, even more if you'll get fired for missing work (happens all the time, especially in low-paying jobs.) It's not that parents (feminists or anyone else) think their kids are just a hassle. Stop with that strawman. It's that balancing family and work can put people in very tough positions. Things like FMLA support families.

  4. Anonymous says:

    On further review of the quotes, maybe you didn't contradict yourself; maybe you meant that working parents automatically have their priorities out of whack. In which case you should probably stop writing, speaking, and blogging.

  5. If you're going to suggest I "stop writing, speaking, and blogging," please have the courage to reveal yourself.

    My post was not about adopting workplace policies that allow parents to take off work for personal matters -- although that is a choice the employers need to work out, not the government -- it was about the issue of where to house sick children so the parents can both go to work.

    I was trying to acknowledge that though this is a problem, it is one parents must resolve for themselves. In other words, the answer isn't to find a place to put the sick kids and/or force employers to allow every employee to take off work every time they have a personal issue. It's isn't realistic or fair to employers.

  6. Anonymous says:

    Suzanne, I agree with what you wrote here, and you didn't mention that the sick kids are often just sent to school because the parents don't keep them home, where other kids end up getting sick.


    Many people who have children in their houses (notice I didn't say homes) are not "parents"...they produce the kids and somehow expect to have a "family" but send the children off from the earliest age for someone else to raise.

    My former neighbor took her baby off to daycare at 6 weeks...she told me happily that most days she stayed asleep in the mornings and was already asleep when she picked her up at 6pm, so she didn't have to do anything but put her to bed! And the woman considered this a good thing! She was not someone who "had" to work, no, she and her husband each made over $100K at IBM. Her older son was raised the same way...These 2 kids spent their early life in daycare all day, when school started they rode the bus every day (in middle school they stood on the corner in the dark at 5:45 am waiting for the bus)until they turned 16 when they each got a car to drive themselves ... Of course at Christmas they had expensive electronic gadgets that they liked to show off to my kids who were the same ages. Now the boy (age 21) is not on speaking terms with his parents,such a sad way to grow up. Kids with money, but no care from the parents.
    Sorry for the digression, but way too many people have children without accepting on the responsibility for taking good care of them.
    Sandy in GA