What to Do When One Parent Enables Your Kid’s ‘Sick’ Excuses
It’s 6:47 a.m. on a Tuesday, I’m measuring coffee grounds, and the toaster just popped one slice of bread completely black. I hear the TV click on low in the living room, and there’s my 10-year-old daughter Mia, curled up on the couch under my faded Ohio State hoodie, a crumpled tissue tucked next to her elbow. “My throat hurts so bad,” she mumbles when I lean down to check. I press my palm to her forehead: no fever, same warm temperature as always. I know what this is. The factoring quiz she’s been moping about since Friday.
My wife Sarah comes in a minute later, holding her laptop already pulled up to the school attendance portal. “I’ll send the note,” she says, clicking through. I step in, keep my voice low so Mia doesn’t hear: “She doesn’t have a fever. She’s faking it to get out of the quiz.” Sarah just blinks, finishes typing the email, hits send, and closes the laptop. “Mia Johnson will be out today due to a sore throat. Please send homework home with her brother,” she reads back to me. “So what if she is? It’s one quiz.”
I was annoyed clear through to my socks. I grew up with a dad who insisted the only acceptable reason to stay home was vomiting or a fever over 101. If you could sit up and watch TV, he’d say, you could go to school. I was convinced Sarah was enabling her: let her avoid hard things now, and soon she’d be skipping every test, dropping every tough class, quitting anything that didn’t come easy. I drove my son to middle school stewing, checked the attendance portal every hour at work, and grew more irritated when I saw Mia marked absent for the day.
When I got home at 5, she was on the back deck painting rocks, eating a cherry popsicle, laughing at our golden retriever stealing her crumpled napkin. Definitely not sick. I held my tongue until after dinner, when we were side by side loading the dishwasher, then brought it up. That’s when I remembered what I’d been too annoyed to think about: when Sarah was 11, just a year older than Mia is now, she had undiagnosed social anxiety that left her throwing up every morning before school. Her mom forced her to go every day, insisted she was just faking to get out of presentations, until she had a full panic attack in the cafeteria and ended up in the ER. Sarah says she’d rather let Mia take a “sick” day than let her get to the point where stress makes her actually physically sick.
That stopped me short. I’d been so focused on not letting Mia develop bad habits that I missed what was right in front of me: what looks like enabling to one parent can look like protecting your kid to the other. But I still had a point. If we let her skip every time something feels hard, she never gets to learn that she can push through small stressors and come out okay. So we sat down after the kids fell asleep, and worked out actual, specific rules, instead of sticking to my “no skipping ever” or her “one day off is no big deal” positions.
First, if Mia says she’s sick, we do the physical check first: fever, vomiting, rash, that kind of thing. If any of those are present, she stays home, full rest, no questions. If there are no physical symptoms, we ask her one specific question: “Is your body hurting, or is your brain feeling too full to handle this today?” If it’s brain stress, we don’t lie and call it sick anymore, but we also don’t automatically ship her off to school. Then we have two non-negotiables: one, she can only take a brain break day once every four weeks. No exceptions, so it doesn’t become a go-to move every time there’s a quiz or a presentation. Two, if she stays home, she has to spend 20 minutes that day working on the thing she was avoiding, with whoever has time. She still has to make up the assignment the next day, no free passes.
We tried this for the first time three weeks after that Tuesday morning, when Mia came to us Sunday night saying her head hurt so bad she couldn’t go to school Monday for her oral presentation on wolves. We asked the question, and she admitted she was so scared she couldn’t fall asleep. We used our one allowed day that month. We practiced her presentation twice after dinner, she got to watch a movie and eat popcorn that night, and she went in first thing Tuesday to do it. She got an A, and told us afterward that it would have been way worse if she’d sat in class all day Monday panicking about going last.
We still disagree sometimes. Last week, she said her stomach hurt the morning of the school cross country run, and Sarah was ready to send the excuse note. I checked the calendar: we’d already used our brain break day that month for the presentation. I suggested a compromise: we’d drop her off, tell the nurse she was feeling iffy, and if she still felt terrible after the first mile, we’d come get her. She agreed, ended up finishing, and even high-fived us when she crossed the line, even if she was second to last.
I still catch myself thinking sometimes that Sarah’s too soft, and she catches herself thinking I’m too hard. We still have the occasional 10-minute argument over coffee before school about whether the sore throat is real or just stress. But this system works most of the time. Sometimes, we still do a “sick” day when it’s been a rough two weeks: she got her boosters last week, was tired, and we had a parent-teacher conference that morning anyway, so we just called it sick and got donuts after.
It’s not perfect, and I don’t know if we’re doing it exactly right. But what I’ve learned is that what looks like enabling isn’t always laziness or spoiling a kid. Sometimes it’s just two different people bringing two different lives to how they parent, and you have to meet somewhere in the middle. Right now, that’s enough for us.
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