What Happens When One Parent Enables Your Kid’s ‘Sick Day’ Excuse: A Dad’s Story
7:12 a.m. by the clock above our stove, coffee’s been brewed but I haven’t poured mine yet, and Lila’s curled up on the living room couch in my faded college hoodie, one sock pulled half off. Sarah’s kneeling in front of her, palm pressed to our 10-year-old’s forehead. “Definitely warm,” she says, glancing over at me. I lean against the doorframe, holding my work laptop. “She was fine at 9 p.m. last night, beating me at Mario Kart and begging for extra ice cream. Didn’t cough once.” “Her throat hurts,” Lila mumbles into the cushion. I know what this is. It’s Wednesday, fifth grade, the day of her big math test she’s moped about for three days. She told me Sunday she “definitely was going to fail and everyone would laugh.” I open my mouth to say we need to go, face the test, get it over with, but Sarah already stands up, grabs her phone to call the school office. “I’ll see you after my meeting,” she says, and that’s that.
An hour later, I finish my first client check-in and get up to grab water. Lila’s still on the couch, volume turned up on TikTok, laughing so hard goldfish crumbs fly out of her nose. No cough, no wincing when she swallows. I shake my head and find Sarah folding laundry at the dining table. “She’s fine,” I say. “She’s not dying, she’s just avoiding a test.” Sarah folds Lila’s sparkly jeans and sets them in the stack. “So what? She stayed up until 10 last night worrying about that test. She cried after dinner Tuesday because her best friend wasn’t talking to her. She’s been going nonstop for six weeks straight. She needs one day off.”
For the first year this started happening, I called what Sarah does enabling. I grew up with a dad who said the only valid reasons to stay home from school were vomiting or a fever over 101. If you faked it, you got sent anyway, and got extra chores when you got home for lying. I carried that rule into my own parenting: you show up, even when it’s hard. I thought we were teaching Lila that the second something gets uncomfortable, you can just run away. That it would set her up for bad habits later, for work, for college, for hard things no one can avoid.
Three months ago, that all shifted. I had a huge presentation to a new client, the one that would make or break my big promotion. I woke up that morning, my chest tight, I could barely catch my breath, and I just knew I couldn’t get in the car, drive to the office, and stand in front of 10 people talking for an hour. I emailed my boss, said I had a sudden stomach bug, could I reschedule. I spent the day on the couch, watched old baseball games, napped, didn’t check work email once. When Sarah got home that night, I expected her to give me grief. She just handed me a glass of iced tea, raised her eyebrow, and said “Told you sometimes you need a fake sick day.” It hit me: I’d been calling what she does for Lila enabling, but I’d just done the exact same thing for myself.
We stopped fighting after that and started talking. We worked out small, concrete rules to replace our old dynamic of me being the hard liner and Sarah being the soft touch. First, if Lila says she’s sick, one of us sits with her for five minutes, no phones, and asks a specific question: “Is your body hurting, or is your brain tired?” It’s simple, it gives her permission to say what’s actually wrong instead of hiding behind a headache. Second, no more than one mental health “sick” day a month, and never two in a row. Third, if you stay home, you get one hour of screen time first thing, then it’s off for the rest of the day. You can rest, read, draw, swing in the backyard, help bake cookies, but no scrolling TikTok for 8 hours straight. Fourth, we talk about whatever’s hard that night at dinner, and make a plan for going back to school the next day.
Two weeks ago, we tested this new system when Lila said her stomach hurt the morning of her fifth grade field trip to the zoo. I immediately assumed she was faking, Sarah almost said yes right away, but we did our check-in. Turns out she’d gotten motion sick on the last class bus trip, threw up in front of half her class, and was so embarrassed she’d rather skip the whole trip than risk it happening again. We didn’t make her go, but we also talked through what she could do next time to feel safer: sit up front with the driver, bring ginger candies, tell the teacher how she feels beforehand. She still chose to skip this one, and that was okay.
I still think there’s value in pushing through hard things. I don’t think every uncomfortable feeling means you get to stay home. Last month, Lila tried to fake sick to get out of a bad haircut she’d agreed to, and we sent her anyway. But what I’ve learned is that what I called enabling wasn’t really enabling at all. It was Sarah giving Lila permission to admit when she’s at her limit, something I never learned to do as a kid. I never faked a sick day, I just pushed through until I got migraines and panic attacks as a teenager, because I didn’t know how to say I couldn’t do it.
We still don’t agree all the time. Last week, Sarah let Lila stay home to get out of PE, and I rolled my eyes all morning. Lila knew I knew she was faking, and she brought me a chocolate chip cookie she baked after lunch to apologize. We all just laughed it off. It’s not the rigid, consistent parenting I thought I wanted when we had kids. It’s messier, sometimes one of us gives in when the other wouldn’t. But so far, it’s working. Lila’s starting to come to us on Sunday nights now, when she’s stressed about the week, instead of faking a headache the next morning. Last month, she told us she was scared about her oral speech, and asked if she could have a sick day Tuesday if she still felt bad Monday night. We said yes, and she ended up doing the speech on Monday, got an A, and told us later just knowing the exit plan was there made it easier to get through. We’re still adjusting the rules, still bickering a little over morning coughs and bad test days. It’s not perfect, but it’s working for us right now.
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