Keeping Ill Children Home

With the news scare about diseases like SARS, a new awareness of children’s health may be in order.

Keeping children home when they’re ill is always a battle of wits. Getting to work because of tough bosses and tougher schedules seem to be turning mother and fatherhood against caring for the child. Now we have a deadly respiratory disease to add to our worries.

The modern assumption is that illness is “any body ailment we can’t hide.”

Sometimes loading a child down with over the counter medications in hopes that he can get through the day care or school doors, seems the best choice. The child looks fine because the Tylenol has kicked in, the cough medicine has relieved a hacking cough, or the Kayopectate has momentarily stopped the uncontrollable diarrhea.

Ten minutes after drop off, the child reports to a friend or a teacher, “I threw up last night five times.” Or he runs to the bathroom and has explosive diarrhea, and then says he did that last night as well.

My favorite is the child with allergies. He has allergies that cause an indescribable and profuse drainage that is the color of grass. The allergies pop up about every two months even in a snow storm, and cause a fever, coughing, vomiting and diarrhea and end in an ear infection.

Allergies, of course, don’t need to be treated. Allergies are simply an idiosyncrasy of a particular child’s makeup. Interestingly enough, most of these allergies are contagious and spread not only to the other students, but to the teachers as well.

The question parents ask most often about ill children is, “Can the child make it through the day?”

First, it’s against the law to send an ill child to school. The state board of health designates that children who have a fever of 99, have vomited in the past 24 hours, have a festering cough, profuse mucus, diarrhea in 24 hours, or spots may not come to school.

Second, the child is not an adult, and often can’t express himself well enough to say, “Mom or Dad, I’m really sick, I just can’t go to school today.”

And third, over the counter medications are not made to hide illnesses. They are made to relieve minor discomforts for short periods.

When children come to school holding their stomachs, or walk in to find a table to lay their head on, or curl up on the futon because they can’t stay awake, they are ill. It’s obvious that they are suffering. And what was once minor stuff, has turned deadly.

Keeping children home from school when they are ill promotes a healthier environment at school. It may even curb something as deadly as SARS. Children make other children ill.

Here are some guidelines to help parents understand children’s illnesses:

• Keep a child home the first day of an illness; he will be ill a shorter time.
• Find a comfortable back up provider who will take an ill child or call sick bay at the local hospital.
• Make sure your child’s dinner diet contains fruit, vegetables, protein (meat, cheese, eggs) and whole grains (like crackers) every night.
• When your child runs a fever, he needs to see a doctor.
• When your child’s nasal discharge is more than he can blow out, see the doctor.