The actual truth: a paper from the CDC finding an apparently quite weak link between poverty and rate of school absence due to sickness stuck that in as one of many somewhat plausible explanations, in a very speculative discussion section.
To emphasize: the headline of this story is not one of the factual scientific claims of the paper.
Also, from the European perspective (and specifically speaking of the technology sector, as that's what I have first-hand experience with), taking sick leave to take care of a child at home isn't a thing, whatsoever. You would just send an email to your team saying that you're sorry but you're working from home because your kid is sick and that would be the end of it.
No compulsion to take vacation.
No compulsion to take sick leave.
No punitive punishments for being human and for your family members being human.
It really is a different world, over here. However, given the American exceptionalism showing up in the thread, I'm going to wager that this probably going to see some vitriolic response.
> However, given the American exceptionalism showing up in the thread, I'm going to wager that this probably going to see some vitriolic response.
I actually don't believe in American exceptionalism at all. Nor European exceptionalism. But I am fed up with people from the most developed part of the world acting shocked and morally outraged when life isn't as amazing everywhere else.
You probably didn't intend it that way, but it comes off as extremely smug.
Anyway, you still have a right to get Kinderkrankengeld for 10 days per year, paid by the national health insurance. Enjoy!
Who pays for this will depend on your employer. Many of them pay for a few days per year. If you need more days or if they don't pay, you can get "Kinderkrankengeld²" from your national health insurance (another 10 days per year).
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When you're more like the rest of the workforce, you show up where you're expected to man the cash register, nurse your patients, drive your truck, clean up the office, etc.
I worked at Starbucks for 5 years. When I got sick, I showed up to work. I know I worked while having the flu, and making drinks for people. If we didn't show up, our hours for next week would be messed up badly and intentionally. We would go from 35 hours to 15 hours, or we'd be scheduled "clopens" - close at midnight, and open at 4:45a the next morning. If you wanted your job, you showed up and vomited on the floor.
I also worked at wal-mart. I was a 3rd shift stocker. I was fired for getting injured on the job by a faulty pallet jack falling on my foot, and "costing the company money" (exact quote). I even have my discharge paper stating that. Needed x-rays and a tetanus shot. And with someone at the time who had little money, lawsuits are out of the question, especially for a corp like Walmart.
I'll take some of that 'commie socialistic European perspective', if you don't mind :)
I work for a European multinational, and it is most certaintly a thing.
How about European low-income people? Low-income people work mostly in retail, transports and logistics, cleaning, construction, and physical jobs. They can't work from home.
A waitress, housekeeper, janitor, or someone else who actually has to be at a specific place to perform their work, doesn't have that kind of flexibility.
Even in IT, if the company doesn't support any remote working (and there are many company that still don't), you'd have no choice but to use a day off.
It’s pretty common in the US as well.
In other words, you're out of touch with ordinary, less privileged workers.
> It really is a different world, over here. The antithesis to the apathetical, if I may be so bold...
Oh, come on. If you're a developer you can have a "work from home" day in the US as well. Plus, you can earn far more and you pay less in taxes.
I honestly think people need counseling and planning before they start to think about starting a family. They need back up plans and contingency strategies.
It used to be that we lived in small communal groups and non nuclear families. Usually matriarchal wherein the post menopausal grandmother plays a crucial role in the post reproductive years to give the attention children need.
Clearly this system worked. We will be hitting 10 billion by 2050 due to exponential population growth. But the world has changed. Coping with the new resource strapped crowded new world is not by handing over the responsibility of child rearing to the state or the tax payers.
There is NO village that will raise YOUR child. It’s time for responsible procreation and talk about such things without fear or shame of being chastised. We can now store our genetic material. People should be given a lot of advice and caution before they want bring children into our future. Responsible parenting must be incentivized and not just procreation in the form of tax breaks and taking over of child rearing by the state. This issue really stresses me and I only see it getting worse.
I don’t know why there isn’t enough funding or initiatives to address this.
(I hear the words of St.George Carlin.)
The “responsible parenting” approach you suggest would basically lead to lower income people never being in a position to have kids. And that would be a tragedy. Having children is one of the greatest joys in life. There is a really remarkable Gallup poll: https://news.gallup.com/poll/164618/desire-children-norm.asp...
Americans 45 and older were polled, and asked what they’d do if they had to do it over again. Just 7% of those with kids said they would’ve had zero kids. By contrast, 55% of those without kids would’ve had at least one. Indeed, while just 7% of people with kids would’ve had none if they did it over again, among those who never had kids, fully 18% wish they would have had 3 or more.
What other incredibly expensive, labor-intensive life choice has that kind of customer satisfaction rating?
I'm not sure if you even realize the value of the support systems that were intact for these families. Not everyone has that. It seems like you entirely missed the point of post above.
What if you had an unplanned pregnancy with a one night stand? What if you live hundreds of miles from your parents? What if your parents aren't with you any more?
The point of counseling would be to get people to understand the risks. Maybe you're in a place where an unplanned pregnancy would be no big deal. Lucky you. You might be in a place where an unplanned pregnancy would turn your life upside down. In that case you better take much more precaution, like using condoms AND birth control.
My point is not that everyone has that support system, but that it doesn't take much support to make having kids workable, and the government can gap-fill for people who don't have intact support structures.
Almost 40% of births in the U.S. each year are the result of unplanned pregnancies, despite intensive sex education in schools. Nobody is like "oh shit, I didn't know that having a kid could be really disruptive to my life. If only I had received counseling!" People keep having kids because people want to have kids. (Indeed, in the U.S., people are having fewer kids (about 2 on average) than they'd ideally want (3, according to polls)). Telling people they shouldn't have kids--which would end up as telling poor people and minorities that they can't afford kids and shouldn't have them--isn't a replacement for offering support such as childcare.
Passing on our genetic material is why we exist. One could make an argument that we live and we die until we can make a semi copy of our genes. It’s an incredibly random process but it’s a biological imperative.
I also disagree that lower income parents won’t have children. I am not saying that we should sterilize poor people! I am just saying that they should sit down and have a talk with someone who will guide them through the maze that is child rearing. It’s also for middle class and even upper class income people. It’s not just money but also the psychological makeup.
Even a simple questionnaire like what’s your five year plan...or illustrating how much it costs and also fairly representative general in media et al that parenting is resented as much as it’s enjoyable.
It’s very skewed now. As a woman, it particularly enrages me when motherhood is glorified. I personally know more than a handful of my own friends who suffer from debilitating post partum depression. And yet ..other than the isolated bubbles..even today, people don’t talk about it. And it’s actually better now. After they were given support and counsel, women started talking about it..perhaps people will stop talking about how glorious it’s is to have children if they are not judged for admitting it.
Also..every woman who has a child massively increase her footprint. It increases with every extra child. It’s something that is never quantified. Maybe in 1600s when we were totally 500 million people, we needed to glorify children so we wont disappear as a species. We will be ten billion soon. So enough.
So. Looks like I am gonna raise my grandaughter. On the plus side, she is perfect. Good thing.
Parenting is harder than it was the first time. Need energy! More plz
The reason I bring up grandparents is because OP’s post struck me as pretty ignorant of the circumstances of the people (disproportionately lower income), who are actually having kids in this country:
> The data reveal a country of close-knit families, with members of multiple generations leaning on one another for financial and practical support.
Raising kids is not that hard and nearly everyone does it. We don’t need counselors telling people not to have kids until they can meet whatever criteria upper middle class people think are a necessary prerequisite for raising children. They need cheaper daycares to make life a little easier.
We can quibble about the veracity of the study and the chosen hypothesis for explanation, but what this is about is people feeling pressure from their workplace to not take sick leave when their child is sick.
And such workplaces are cruel and monstrous and should not ever exist and I see it as the state’s role to strongly and with harsh punishments enforce that to make this into a societal norm if it isn’t already the status quo. That’s at least my very bog-standard German view, where, while there obviously are problems, this actually is the status quo. So it can be done.
To me it seems completely clear that all people have to have unlimited sick leave and that obviously includes sick leave for when their children are sick.
except that in the majority of the world people live in more communal settings. You're probably thinking of nations where people don't even know their neighbors. Also you misunderstand "village". The way I see that term nowadays is more about public and private institutions that provide support for kids in their education and upbringing. At least in SV there are tons of things going on every weekend where kids can go do things for "free" or at very low cost. You just have to look. For example last week the tech museum in sj had free admission sponsored by KDFC the local classical music station, home depot has free workshops every few months, the school district has free weekend field trips for families with preschool kids, not to mention the library has stuff that's going on every single day, more stuff : https://www.bayareaparent.com/
Again..it’s not about anything being ‘free’ or ‘low cost’. It’s time. It shouldn’t be time sacrificed from parents’ lives that leads to resentment and guilt and finally therapy (if the kids can afford it..but apparently everyone can and if not, they are pharmaceutically managed..)
Group activities are not what raises a child. Learning interactions at every stage in life and not being instructed but observing life..children mimic their peers and the adults around them..if you put a child in front of a tv and with other kids, they will learn from them.
Every child is a crap shot. The genetic gamble might pay off and it would be a rocket engineer or a psychopath or both..if society bears the financial cost of child rearing, parents are supposed to rear them well. The taxes we pay to run public schools, that’s the ‘village’ contributing. It’s not so the parents can go live their lives and work so they can send their sick children to school. I realize some are poor and need to work. So they must move and live a lifestyle they can afford. They need someone giving them financial counsel and job placement and guidance.
But they are handing them off to the state to rear them and we are paying double and we are going to end up with sheep for the next generation with everyone being the same as they all conform to the state instructions.
This scares me!
Feel free not to have kids, I definitely don't want parents who are so pessimistic and scared about the future that they won't even try
> genetic gamble
>99% not about genetics
> handing them off to the state
at least in more progressive areas the state/communities aren't out to make your child into a mindless drone
Fiji is just barely above "third world" status. What's your excuse, USA?
I don't mind paying 50/50 in taxes or around there.. I don't have to feel bad about not helping people in need in Denmark.
(Yes, yes, taxes does alleviate my personal responsibility for being a nice person who helps other people -- but small acts of kindness doesn't scale)
Well, what's Fiji's excuse for being "barely above 'third world' status" ?
What makes you think it's normal for Fiji to have low standards of development, but it's an aberration for the USA?
It turns out there are many different dimensions of development, and just like many countries, the US ranks poorly on some of those dimensions, due to extremely complicated and maybe intractable political and cultural issues.
Well there's a very long list of reasons starting from geographic isolation to brain drain (incl. to the USA) all the way up to military coups, but I doubt that was a serious question so there's no point me answering your question in any great detail.
> What makes you think it's normal for Fiji to have low standards of development, but it's an aberration for the USA?
See above for why Fiji has low standards of development. In comparison, USA is the most prosperous and powerful nation on earth and has been for over a century. You've enjoyed democracy for almost 250 years. You've been to the moon.
> the US ranks poorly on some of those dimensions, due to extremely complicated and maybe intractable political and cultural issues.
And at last after the defensive stuff is out of the way, we see an attempt at an answer, abstract and hand-wavy though it is.
Richer countries tend to (or should?) have nicer things, its reasonable to ask why one of the richest doesn't have something that much poorer countries do.
Having high quality of life like easy access to childcare, sick leave and vacation time from work, etc., is part of being a rich country, or more precisely, a developed country. So your argument amounts to "rich countries should be rich", which is circular.
If by "rich" you mean GDP per capita as opposed to development, I don't think it's a great metric -- there are plenty of countries with horrible, oppressive regimes that have a high GDP per capita. There are many low- or middle-income countries that I would rather live in than the "rich" UAE or Saudi Arabia, for example.
Also, how are you defining "should" ? Doesn't that imply some capacity for moral reasoning, or at least willpower? The US has neither -- it is not a person and it has no mind of its own. Saying the US "should" do something is like saying a hurricane "should" avoid my house. It'd be nice if it did, but it sounds a bit odd to put it that way.
This is the thing which attracts immigrants from all over the socialist/communist republics of the world and they are the ones who make it big.
No one wants to change that, there is double speak here when people do sympathize but when it comes to foot the bill, no tax payer is ready for that.
There is a continuous stream of polls showing things like “More Americans now want to raise taxes on corporations and high incomes, than lower them”.
Obviously most Americans don’t have high incomes so it’s still someone else’s bill - but sentiments are shifting somewhat.
Is it taxes? Your taxes will go up or money will be missing in the budget (or you will need to get more debt).
Is it the employer? Wage suppression.
You haven't gained or won anything really. There's no free lunch.
I will make an exception though: If you make people stay home when they are sick, you may reduce sickness overall. However, if people spend their entire "Family Care Leave" on rugby matches and then illness strikes, it's not going to work.
The cost is shared between taxpayers and the employer – employers get a 150% tax deduction for wages paid for family care leave.
Taxes will go up, and perhaps some prices. This is good.
> You haven't gained or won anything really. There's no free lunch.
Workers maybe haven't gained anything, but a worker has, and that's wonderful. You can argue all you want about economic models and the absence of free lunches but at the end of the day, a parent who needs to take care of a sick child gets to do that, and having the cost paid elsewhere in taxes or higher prices is a boon.
Remember, everyone gets those five days. Big earners, small earners. It evens out to nothing. Everyone can't live at the expense of everyone else.
By the way, “poor life choices” is not a valid argument.
Edit: ok, in view of the objections regarding the technical definiton of “failed state” let me reword it to “failed society”. It is closer to my own objection anyway
There are many, many countries in the world where a much larger fraction of the population is living in much poorer material conditions than in the US, and not just places like Syria or Somalia.
Actually, taking this study at face value, I'd guess that the fact that the poorest students only miss on average of 1 extra day of school per year due to illness is evidence that the US is not a failed state by any sort of global standard. I'd wager that that number is a lot higher in a lot of places.
You can't compare upper-level office jobs in Europe with lower-level shift work in the US.
Plus, I've found that on average Americans are more health anxious (for example, if I search in Google Spain in Spanish "I just accidently hit my head with a wall" the treatment results I'll get will be "if you feel fine afterwards, and you didn't black out or anything like that, it's okay" while if I do the same search on google.com/ncr in English the second result tells me to go to the hospital now and demand a CT scan of my brain to check for an internal hemorrhage) than Europeans are.
It doesn't? At least where I am from, the cost of healthcare very much depends in your income, as the insurance rates are calculated like taxes (with an upper limit, of course). And this only covers basic medical care. Anything that is viewed as "luxury" or "cosmetic" is either only covered partly, or not at all, for example artificial dentition, and you need additional insurance for that, which not everyone can afford.
I am almost amazed when Americans think that healthcare in Europe is basically free. Nearly 1/10 of my monthly income is spent on medical insurances. The only difference is that it is quite hard to "opt-out" of the insurance.
Dentistry is another thing altogether.
Also opting out of "public health insurance" is impossible here in Spain, because it's a right. You can however choose to get private insurance/get treated by a private healthcare company.
Let's not forget that every time we pass stronger "labor laws" (e.g. higher minimum wage), we do see job loss, decreased hours, second jobs. A paper by the National Bureau of Economic Research showed that the costs to low-income workers outweighed the benefits by about three to one. Telling McDonalds it must pay people to stay home will almost certainly just accelerate the pace of automation.
The concept you're looking for is "insurance". It solves the problem here (for the employer, for the employee, for the other employees, for society as a whole).
Another core tenet of insurance is that the event against which it protects is not certain (or even likely, typically) to occur. Though this has been somewhat perverted with medical these days ("I want coverage for my $200/mo prescription"), it's still the basic idea. American workers take about 5 sick days per year (https://www.statista.com/statistics/682924/sick-leave-days-a... that's not an uncertainty. And because sick days are limited, insurance doesn't make sense: businesses offer as many sick days as they are able and willing to fund; any more they just don't cover.
In summary, there's no "catastrophic situation" here, it's just a serious expense many can't or wont cover.
>Among children who had gastrointestinal illness, 84.6% (family income <$35,000), 86.1% ($35,000–$49,999), 90.3% ($50,000–$74,999), 89.6% ($75,000–$99,999), and 87.4% (≥$100,000) missed school in the past year. Similarly, 83.7% of children living below the poverty level with gastrointestinal illness missed school, compared with 88.3% of those living at or above the poverty level.
* As customers, (1) when the washroom of a diner is dirty, the first reaction is not "Hey, maybe the cleaner was sick", it is an instant negative view. (2) when your favorite coffee shop is closed, most people don't think "I hope everything is alright, I'll come back tomorrow."
* As employees, (1) When someone doesn't show up for a meeting, most people will go for the lowest denominator "Person A is disrespecting my time", etc.
* As employer, (1) When someone doesn't show up to complete a project/deadline/task, the company can go bankrupt, be less profitable or lead to disruptions.
* As fellow humans, we mostly assume that the experience we have had or seen (e.g. having a child and nurturing them or working in tech vs laborer) follow the same mold as everyone else until we read and understand more about that.
Therefore, society creates an environment where unexpected absenteeism is frowned upon. Whether that is the correct modus operandi is for each and everyone of us to dig in and ask ourselves.
