Parents Are Best Medicine For Sick Kids

October 11, 1994|By LINDA BURTON Special to the Sun-Sentinel

What are so many sick children doing in school?

It seems that every third mother I meet tells me about some doctor okaying the return to school of a child with a temperature, a wheezing cough and/or runny nose, circles under his eyes, body aches and a general feeling of miserable lassitude.

But what the heck? exclaim the doctors. There's no real reason for a child to stay at home when he is no longer contagious and does not present a health risk to others.

So sick kids, who are supposedly no longer contagious, are being bundled off to school in droves.

This makes me sad. In the recent past, one rule of thumb for the amount of time a sick child needed to stay at home was "24 hours without a temperature."Today, it is "24 hours on an antibiotic."

I do not think this is what Florence Nightingale had in mind.

Surely the fine art of recovering from any illness - running the gamut from the common cold to multiple fractures - involves a great deal more than 24 hours' worth of antibiotics and a pat on the back from the pediatrician.

Children who are sick usually feel lousy, whether or not they are contagious.

Two or three days spent in bed with breakfast trays, ginger ale, extended nap periods, a checkers game with Dad and an extra video rental or two is pretty good common-sense medicine for most childhood ills.

While antibiotics may certainly accelerate care today, very few parents would agree that medicine alone can ever substitute for a parent's time and attention.

The problem is that parents are being asked to adjust to the demands of the workplace, instead of the more sensible and humane reverse, and the need to get the company's annual report out is being put before the need of a sick child to sleep the day away.

Many doctors, who worry about the effects of over-using potent medicine, admit they sometimes dispense antibiotics a sick child may not even need in response to the parents' desire to get back to the office as soon as possible.

They claim that parents today simply can't afford the time a sick child requires to convalesce.

But what about the child?

Must a child's needs be measured primarily in terms of other people's needs? It seems to me that business must begin making the concessions here. Business must begin acknowledging and accommodating the right of children to be sick in their own homes, in their own beds.

Instead of creating more of those rather poignant day-care programs for sick children, or pressuring working parents to send their sick children back to school before they are really ready to go, why don't we insist on office policies flexible enough to allow working parents to be where a sick child really needs them? Which is at home, by their side, filling up the vaporizer, ladling out the hot soup and adjusting the tracking on the VCR.

Linda Burton is founder of a national support organization, Mothers At Home, and co-author of the book, What's a Smart Woman Like You Doing At Home?

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