When my children were little, sick days were a crisis because it meant one of us had to take a day off work and stay home with them. Now, they can stay home by themselves, but there is always that dread when you get the call in the middle of the day from school and you have to pick them up.
Given that I have a job with little flexibility, and I’m not traveling in my own car, this often presents a different kind of crisis. Unfortunately, this means my kids have spent many hours lying in the nurse’s office waiting for us to pick them up when we were both out of pocket for work.
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The past few weeks we’ve experienced an awful bout of sickness like so many other families in our area. Unlike the coddling that we do when kids are very young, for teenagers, we merely make sure they have the medications they need and take them to the doctor when necessary.
However, there is a new challenge that I’ve noticed when teenagers get sick - trying to get them to slow down long enough to get well. My kids don’t want to miss school when they’re sick because it means they will get behind. That’s why they start the day sick so many times, and then call me in the middle of the day needing to come home. They also don’t want to miss their afterschool activities or give up one second of their social lives. This creates a constant cycle of getting sick, getting partially well and then getting sick again.
When you think about how adults behave, we model this very same behavior. We push through sickness and go to work and continue all our activities, slogging through them the best we can. We feel pressure to keep going – and now, as a society, we have passed that pressure along to our children.
Yet, we know when we are sick that our bodies need time to heal. Employers say: “Don’t come to work sick.” Schools tell parents to keep their kids home when they are sick. The reality is that we all feel pressure to fulfill our commitments. This means sick people go to school and work and get other people sick.
Until we, as adults, model behavior that prioritizes our health, why should our children?
Amanda Lamb is the mom of two, a reporter for WRAL-TV and the author of several books, including some on motherhood. Find her here on Mondays.