My husband refuses to take carer's leave when our kids are sick - I have to

"He always wants me to 'take one for the team', and it's infuriating," the Aussie mum tells Kidspot.

Shona Hendley

3 min read

May 22, 2023 - 11:50AM

Primary School

Don't miss out on the headlines from Primary School. Followed categories will be added to My News.

My husband and I are equals.

We both work full-time on nearly identical salaries, and we both share the parenting load: taking our two children to extracurricular activities, helping them with homework, packings school lunches, doing household chores and parenting in general.

There is an exception to this though, something that my husband Mark and I do not share the load with or see eye to eye on and it is a very large source of contention in our house - carer’s leave.

Want to join the family? Sign up to our Kidspot newsletter for more stories like this.

Source: iStock

"He has 300 accrued hours of sick leave"

My sick leave, which has mostly been taken as carer’s leave to look after our two children when they are sick, sits on less than 10 hours, so just over a day. On the other hand, Mark’s leave has accrued to over 300 hours because he has been at his workplace for so long and refuses to take it unless it is him that is actually sick.

For the first few years when I was working and our kids were at school or kinder and would get sick, I was happy to put my hand up and look after them. For me, it felt like the right thing to do because I knew that even if I wasn’t at home caring for them and Mark was, I’d still worry anyway.

Now though, as our two kids are in their final years of primary school and older, I have become less apprehensive when they aren’t feeling well and more confident in being able to still move on with my responsibilities, regardless of who is looking after them. The problem is, we have a lack of family support in this area and Mark and I are the only ones who can actually stay home with our kids if they do get sick.

Now, due to the kids having Covid-19 a couple of times and taking a few weeks off school, my leave has taken a beating. Every time it goes back up, someone else gets sick and I feel like it has been hovering around the 10-hour mark for a year now.

Despite this and the stress it causes me, Mark refuses to use any of his sick leave to care for the kids.

He tells me that because his job is further away (he travels an hour) and because I work at a school, which he deems “more understanding,” it is “easier” for me to do it. He also tries to argue that because it was me who always took carer’s leave when they were younger, it makes more sense for me to keep doing it now.

So ultimately, he lists off a list of BS excuses to not take his leave and for me to always take “one for the team” as he likes to put it.

"What if I need the leave for myself?"

It frustrates me to no end because what if I actually need the leave for myself? What if I get sick and have no leave to take? I have put these scenarios to Mark multiple times, but he just makes more excuses or dismisses the concern as if it will never actually happen.

For me, it is more than just this though, his insistence on me taking carer’s leave and him still working screams unfairness. It says to me that he views his job as more important than mine, and in some ways that he sees it as more important than our kids too.

Every time one of the kids gets sick (which seems to be a lot in recent months), we are arguing over the same issue again but each time it is Mark that starts getting ready for work anyway and me, tending to the kids and making a phone call to my manager telling her I can't come in.

Over a more recent disagreement, I asked Mark why he doesn't just see if he can work from home if this ever happens. Because of the nature of my job, I can't, but his workplace offers flexibility so in reality, he could do this. But even to this, Mark refuses to budge, telling me that he wouldn't actually get any work done if he was having to look after a sick kid at the same time.

Ultimately, I am lucky with the majority of our marriage, parenting and home life, it is much more equal than many other families I know but despite this, this issue not only frustrates me but generates so much stress too because you just never know what is going to happen in the future and when you might need leave.