The new flu symptom for parents: Who stays home?

Families are under intense pressure as they must decide which working parent gets tasked with flu duty. It may all come down to: Whose job is more important?

Forget fevers and sniffles. For working parents across the country, the most stressful flu symptom this fall may be that tense breakfast-table negotiation: Who is going to stay home with the kids? Who is going to wait in line for the vaccine? Who spends the night in emergency? And that unspoken question potentially underlying every answer: Whose job is more important?
“There's a lot of trading off in my office,” says Tami O'Dette, an Ottawa mother of four-year-old twins who works as a technical writer at an engineering firm. When her daughter came down with the flu, she stayed home since her job is more flexible than her husband's. “I'm lucky that in my office I can just shut my laptop, say, ‘Ava has the flu' and take off.”
The H1N1 pandemic, with its school closings and high absenteeism rates, arrives at a time when Canada has more families than ever with two working parents.
It also has highlighted the complications facing parents when kids get sick. Flexible workplaces have made those arrangements easier, but many parents are using up vacation time to stay home or missing pay altogether. For divorced parents, the negotiation can be even more delicate. And while fathers are doing a share of the nursing duties, it's still mainly moms in the role of first response.
“My experience is, from my research, my students, other mothers, when a kid is sick at school they still call mom,” says Andrea O'Reilly, associate professor of women's studies at Toronto's York University.
She suggests that bias still has an impact on the role of mothers in the work force: “If you are away from work, you're seen as not as committed to your job. A year from now, nobody can prove it, but if a position comes available, they might remember the week or two you were away during the swine flu.”
In Kelowna, B.C., Nicole McNichol and her husband run their own businesses, but when their children came down with the flu last week, she juggled her work to manage their care, even into the night.
“That's just sort of how it goes,” she says, pointing out that the flu struck during a busy time for her husband's boat-repair business, while her job as a consultant for a skin-care line allows her to make calls and arrange evening appointments – and handle requests for orange juice and cuddles.
And, she acknowledges, she probably wouldn't be happy leaving her kids so sick. “I'd always be worrying.” As for the late-night rounds, “it just happens because my husband could sleep through an earthquake,” she says with a sigh.
After years of being the first call for her six-year-old son Kenny, Calgary lawyer Johanna Price finds herself in a secondary role after her husband's layoff. Before, “it would have all fallen to me. It was unspoken. It wasn't that he was necessarily asking me to, but I felt compelled to take on more of that role and try to be flexible.”
Her husband, at the time, had a high-level executive position, and, Ms. Price says, she wanted to support him. “For him to take time off from work, that would be perceived as inappropriate, whereas when the mom takes time off from work, it's seen as the normal course.”
Now, she says with a laugh, she has to quell her frustration when her husband abandons the vaccine lineup with Kenny because it's too long. “If it was me, would I have waited in line? Yes. Do I feel guilty that I wasn't there? Yes.”
For two-income families, the bottom line is that no matter which parent stays home, the flu season will take a financial toll – in wages missed or vacation time lost. Ann Whiteaker, a bookkeeper in Victoria with three school-aged children, says any more illness in her family will mean using up holidays or working weekends to make up for lost pay. She and her ex-husband shared the duties initially when their kids began to get sick last month, but eventually, they ended up staying home with Mom. “I had to come back to work and do extra hours to get caught up. … I have no more sick days left.”