Staying home with a poorly child

This week, four out of five of my family have had a horrid fluey, achey, coldy, coughy bug. That's everyone except me. They had it in succession, like dominoes.

What is a normal expectation of an employer, regarding a parent with an ill child? It seems to me that it's such a grey area. I looked in our staff handbook, and it was a little vague, talking about responsibilities for dependants, and if time off was needed, to please try and give as much notice as possible. Yeah, right. Like flu bugs come along on a schedule.

I just don't know what is reasonable to expect these days. Is it standard practice, would you say, that a parent can phone up in the morning and take a day's sick leave to look after an ill child, as if they were ill themselves? Is it standard practice that they can phone up the next day and take another day? How many days in a row would be accepted without raised eyebrows?

I feel I'm pretty conscientious. As it turned out, I needed only to be at home for two days. I split one of the days with Husband, working in the morning and coming home at lunchtime. The other day, I went in first thing and picked up work I could do at home. It just so happened that one of the days I was off was a particularly bad day to be off. But these things happen, and I feel I really tried my best. I was in the workplace as much as I reasonably could be, and I made good use of the time when I had to be at home (actually, I would say I was more efficient than usual, but the whole working-at-home debate is for another day). I have been left, however, with indications that I was at the limit of what was acceptable.

I clearly need to talk about this with my manager, and I do have my annual review next week, which is a good forum because we can talk about the policy and practice, rather than one specific incident. The culture of the organisation isn't particularly family-friendly, but I hadn't been aware of quite how family-unfriendly it is. I've just been lucky that we've had a pretty healthy time since I've been in the job, and when a child has been ill, either Husband has been able to stay at home, or the child has been old enough and well enough to stay on their own with frequent texts to make sure that they are ok. (I didn't like doing that, but I guess I picked up the culture fairly quickly and realised that I had to save my credits for when I really needed them.)

I would like the process to work on trust. As I say, I feel I went out of my way to continue as best I could. However, I sense that I might be coming from a very different angle to my manager, and that's why I would like a few opinions on what is standard practice these days. Or does it vary hugely? I'm interested to know.

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