Surviving Daycare Sick Days
We were blessed to have our baby at home with us and our part-time nanny for her first year, and we were blessed again shortly after her first birthday to get her into a great neighborhood preschool that we all love and that’s about a mile from our house. The first couple of weeks of daycare were phenomenal. We love our nanny, but as our daughter was napping less and getting into things more, we needed more hours of care. That need felt increasingly pressing as her first day of school approached, and I was so relieved to have a longer-than-four-hour chunk of time to get a bunch of teaching and research work done.
With these blissful hours of focused work, though, comes what I call the illness quota. Over the first six months of daycare, the toddler has contracted a couple of ear infections, hand foot and mouth disease, and a half dozen fever-inducing viruses. The sickness wasn’t a surprise, exactly. It’s no secret that kids starting school or daycare contract pretty much everything. We’d been warned. Our friends told us about this study that suggests that couples with multiple children will have at least one person in the household carrying a virus at least half the time. (It was a pretty small study, but seems right.) But as with most things with parenting (and life, I guess), knowing about something is (emphatically!) not the same as experiencing it.
Since August of 2023, all of the members of our four-person family have been sick at least one week of every month. At one point, I started tracking how many days we had to change plans due to someone being ill, but I stopped after a month because it was too depressing. It’s disruptive when any of the four of us are sick, but it’s especially disruptive when the toddler has a fever on a weekday and either my husband or I need to cancel work. I find myself thrown into despondency when we’re ill and wanted to explore what it is, exactly, about missing daycare that I find so challenging.
The Psychological Purgatory of Sick Days
My experience of toddler sick days involves a complex mess of pressures that I think all add up to pretty significant stress. Now, my husband and I have a lot of flexibility in our jobs, good insurance, and financial capacity that give us a lot of margin that most people don’t have. Even so, these days feel hard. Here are some things that I think contribute to the mental load:
Holding the anxiety of managing a small child’s illness. For the most part, when our toddler has been sent home, her symptoms haven’t been that bad, but a couple of times, she has registered pretty high fevers and gotten pretty listless, to the degree that I’ve considered taking her to the ER. I am not typically anxious about her wellbeing, but the moments when I see how small and vulnerable she is can be really scary.
Deciding which parent takes time off. The metrics here can be complex. For example, as a professor, I get paid whether I cancel office hours or not, but my husband is a therapist and does not get paid if he doesn’t see his clients. If my husband cancels his sessions, there might be anywhere from 1-5 people who are impacted in a way that can be really significant to their mental health, whereas if I cancel classes, that’s 84 students who are impacted, and that can really impact the quality of the course at some points in the semester, but most if not all of those 84 students will be thrilled. And if we’re honest, both of us mostly like our jobs and would rather work than be home with a sick baby, especially when we are fatigued ourselves. (Jennifer Senior’s excellent book All Joy and No Fun cites a study that suggests that we are far from the exception in this preference.)
Figuring out what to do during a sick day. I find this one extremely hard because I am such a planner. I will work during her nap assuming I don’t fall asleep myself (no guarantees) but should I try to get work done at other times when I can, like while the baby is occupied with stickers or Ms Rachel? Or should I let work go entirely? I find it difficult to decide and stressful to be in between. And then there is the challenge of trying to set up the toddler with enriching activities so she isn’t watching TV all day.
Living with the uncertainty of how long she’ll be sick, and whether and how long the rest of us will be sick. This requires lots of contingency planning. If she goes back tomorrow, then I’ll be able to do x and y, but if she wakes up with a fever and can’t go back, then my husband will have to do a, which means I’ll have to do b, and x might get done on the weekend but I think I’ll just have to stay up late tonight to finish y… This gets more complex the more days we’re home with her, and it makes my brain so tired.
Mourning the loss of leisure and solitude. After working all day at childcare and maybe also my job, I reconvene with the rest of the family (assuming everyone isn’t already home sick), and we have to do the normal stuff PLUS contingency planning (is she going to need a lunch packed for tomorrow, or will she be home again?) and have to try to restore order from a day in which someone pulled at least 200 things out of drawers or off shelves. And then I often have to get any teaching work done after bedtime, which means no precious evening hours of knitting or novel reading.
Recognizing my selfishness. After a few sick days, I consider doing ethically objectionable things such as not taking her temperature so that I don’t know that she has a fever, not technically, or dosing her with fever-reducer at 6:30 AM so she’d at least make it through part of the day before being sent home, maybe even through nap time if we’re lucky. And then I feel bad about myself for contemplating risking getting all of the teachers and other kids and their families sick so that I can have a few quiet hours to do work, which makes me worried about what kind of person I’d be in ethical situations with higher stakes requiring greater sacrifice for the good of others. Then again, the other kids are probably what got her sick in the first place….
Ways to Cope with the Mental Load
I have Googled “what to do when my kid is home sick from daycare” pretty much every time our daughter has been fevered, and what I’ve wanted is a list of mental reframes and suggested activities to help me get through it. I haven’t been able to find one yet, so I wrote my own. These are things that I’ve tried to get through the sick days with as much grace and the least amount of stress as I can manage.
As much as possible, my husband and I eliminate uncertainty about who will be with the toddler on a sick day in advance. I took a page from a colleague’s book (thanks, Steve!) and requested all of my classes to be scheduled MWF so that during the semester, my husband can plan to take those days off to care for a sick kid, and I plan to take T/TH and any sick days that fall during my breaks. We can make adjustments if we need to, but it’s really nice to have a default plan so we don’t feel like we are negotiating for scarce resources when we’re already stressed out.
I try to cut out as much work as I can without sacrificing the quality of my teaching. Sometimes this means cutting a small assignment from the syllabus or giving fewer individual comments on homework, and sometimes it means not doing a grand redesign of a lesson plan and teaching something that I’ve taught before and that I know works fine. If I am doing childcare when I wasn’t expecting to, I am going to be doing less work one way or another, so I might as well accept it and try to make it work for me and my students instead of stressing about not doing as much as I’d hoped.
If people offer to help or we know they would help us if we asked, we accept or ask for help. We don’t live in the same town as my parents, but they will gift us money for take out to help us feed ourselves on the especially hard days. When margins are thin, not having to think about or prepare food can make a huge difference. Our foster parent licensing agency will also send us food delivery on occasion when we are sick. For a while, I would turn them down when they would offer a meal, thinking some other family could probably use it more, but now we ALWAYS say yes. Some of our local friends will happily bring us groceries or soup or medicine–things that are practically helpful and remind us that we have support, we have friends, and we will see them again some day. If our teenager isn’t sick, this is also a great time to call on him to help share the load, too, and he seems especially to appreciate opportunities to be helpful when we obviously benefit from it.
I make games for myself to try to make incremental progress on chores while caring for a stir-crazy child. She wants to go outside? We go, and I start picking up leaves off the ground or pulling weeds and putting them in the yard waste bin. She often joins in (win!). She wants “food?! Food?!”? I try to bake something like banana bread while she snacks on something in the kitchen. My baseline puttering activity is the put away game, where I see something that needs to be put away, put it away, look for the first thing I see to put away wherever I end up, put that away, and follow the trail of things around the house. (I think I may be playing one unending round of this game until I die–I have yet to put all the things away.) If the toddler is feeling really clingy, the put away game doesn’t work very well. If she isn’t clingy, then it sometimes backfires, because if I open a cupboard to put something away, suddenly the contents of that cupboard may become utterly fascinating and require being individually taken out, examined, and strewn across the floor. And so the put away game continues.
We get outside as much as possible. If the weather isn’t too bad and the toddler isn’t too sick, it is so good to get out of the house. We’ll go for a walk or hang out in the yard (probably collecting yard waste; see above). A little jaunt outside can be a huge mood booster, especially if it lets us get a little more mental or physical space from each other than we have in the house.
When we’re consuming media together, we mostly watch and play the stuff we both genuinely want to watch and play. We both like live action musicals, so I’ll put on Hello Dolly or The Young Girls of Rochefort, and we’re both happy campers for at least 15 minutes (which is longer than Bluey holds her attention). She also LOVES holding the Nintendo Switch joycons, and again, if she and I both aren’t too sick, we’ll play a few songs on Just Dance. I don’t worry about screen time very much on sick days, so long as it isn’t keeping her from sleeping when she needs to,
I hydrate, hydrate, hydrate! I feel better, and maybe the modeling inspires her to get more fluids, too.
Enjoy the sick cuddles and the bonus time with my baby. My daughter isn’t a big snuggler, except when she’s sick, has an owie, or is especially tired. I try to soak up the time when she wants to be physically close and enjoy the excuse to sing along with Julie Andrews while the toddler spins slow circles around the living room with a goofy grin.
When we tell friends we have to miss something again because someone is ill, they tell us that it gets better. At some point they have to develop those immune systems, right? In the meantime, I think the best thing I can do for myself is to assume and accept that sick days will happen and to try to roll with them, be intentional about the time to connect with my baby, and also to be grateful for every day when we are all healthy.
