It was mid-morning when Nadine Jones got the daycare call every working mother dreads—her son spiked a fever and needed to be picked up.
Jones, a senior associate at a big D.C. law firm, newly divorced with full custody of her 14-month-old son, knew what that call meant: her day was about to unravel.
At the daycare, another single mother pulled Jones aside.
“Don’t you have to work?” she asked.
Yes, Jones replied.
“Okay, this is what you do,” the woman said, “Tomorrow, just before you drop him off, you’re gonna give him children’s Tylenol. That’s gonna bring his fever down and give you two or three hours at work. Then you’ll have another hour or two before they confirm it’s back up. Don’t you need those five hours?”
Jones did.
Working parents often scramble to stay employed while caring for their families. Cold and flu season can be especially brutal for caregivers, and this season we’ve had the highest number of cases in 30 years.
But cold and flu season isn’t just making us sick—it’s disproportionately pushing working mothers to make impossible choices: either compromise their child’s care or face lasting career consequences, such as stalled advancement and burnout. Or, in Jones’s case, send her sick child to daycare, and risk infecting everyone else—all for the sake of a partial day at work.
The double load: breadwinner and on-call nurse
Working mothers are facing a twofold problem. First, sexism is deeply entrenched in society so they end up doing most of the caregiving. Second, many companies don’t take kindly to employees using PTO, or don’t provide enough for caregivers with children. The result is a double whammy that forces mothers like Jones to make impossible choices.
Similarly, a Pew Research Center survey of 5,152 U.S. adults found even when a heterosexual woman earns as much or more than her husband, she does more at home. On average, these women spend two hours a week more on caregiving and 2.5 hours more on housework, while their husbands have 3.5 more hours a week for leisure activities.
Pew’s research also found that the majority of Americans say society “values men’s contributions at work more than their contributions at home,” showing how gender bias is still a deeply entrenched part of our culture.
Stephanie Steele-Wren is a licensed psychologist who runs her own practice. Even though she and her husband make roughly the same income, his work schedule is less flexible, so she does most of the sick-day caretaking for their one-year-old daughter.
With a six-month waitlist for her practice, she does everything possible to avoid canceling patients, including once taking a client call from her car outside the hospital where her child was in surgery. “The biggest emotional piece for me is feeling like I have to maintain my professionalism while I’m just feeling so scattered and overwhelmed and overstimulated,” she shares.
Caregiving vs. career growth
Many mothers also feel that caretaking responsibilities directly affects their career progression, with two out of three in the BabyCenter.com survey fearing they appear unprofessional and unreliable. The survey also found that 70% of moms pass up additional opportunities at work to avoid possible conflicts.
Steele-Wren knows this feeling well. Since having a child, Steele-Wren has scaled back her business. “There are no days off with being a business owner and self-employed. And there are absolutely no days off with being a mom.”
As a small business owner, taking time off to care for a sick child means lost income. But even caregivers with generous PTO banks often feel they can’t actually use it. Companies may offer “unlimited paid time off” and “family-friendly policies,” but often working mothers are penalized for using these benefits. This includes receiving poor reviews on their annual evaluations, not receiving promotions, or feeling pressure not to be perceived as a burden, shares Lacey Kaelani, CEO of Metaintro, a job search engine that runs on open-source data processing over 600 million jobs in near real time.
You can have policies on paper, adds employee-law attorney Pam Howland, but if the culture rewards attendance and productivity above all else, it doesn’t really matter what the policy says.
In fact, in 2025, a record number of working mothers quit their jobs.
Joe Mull, a consultant who specializes in increasing employee commitment, points out that the paradigm of mothers like Nadine Jones worrying about taking time off points to a bad system. “If your team can’t absorb someone stepping away for a day without that person having to work overtime to recover, your staffing model is broken,” he says.
Managers are the first line of defense
Interpreting company policy often comes down to managers, who can be the difference between staying or leaving for moms with kids. “Your entire corporate experience hinges on who your boss is, period. That’s it, especially for working mothers,” says Nadine Jones.
Jones shares how in some of her most challenging years as a parent, she had a boss who created a safe environment “to be vulnerable and to have a family that didn’t always, you know, fall into line.” She says the psychological safety and scheduling accommodations allowed her to do her best work for the organization while being present for her son.
Having an understanding boss can mean everything to a caregiver. Research even shows that a manager has more influence on an employee’s mental health than a therapist and that a compassionate manager creates more loyal employees.
However, few managers are getting this right. One study of over 3,700 parents (97% of whom were women) found that fewer than 4% of moms feel comfortable asking managers for what they need. Flexibility ranked among their top desires.
Many managers are promoted for performance, not people skills, notes Howland. That’s why it’s essential to train them to understand discretion, flexibility, and the human side of policy enforcement.
Turnover is expensive. Howland cautions—do you really want to lose talent because managers were too stringent on PTO or sick-care policies?
The companies who get it right
There are a few companies who are managing to create a culture that allows working mothers to take time off for caregiving or designing systems that create less discrimination. For example, Vanguard, one of the world’s largest investment companies with more than 20,000 employees and at least 9,000 caregivers has an attrition rate of roughly 8%, about half the industry standard.
Kathryn Larkin, Vanguard’s Head of Global Benefits, says employees actually take advantage of their time-off benefits because “they’ve seen those who have gone before them continue with great careers. And so when you see that in practice, you have the confidence that if that is me, I can take the leave and I won’t be punished . . . it’s culturally appropriate, it’s accepted, it’s encouraged.”
Meanwhile, Workforce platform Deputy, which designs scheduling tools for shift-based workers, says sick season forces companies to rethink flexibility for roles that require coverage. Internally, Deputy emphasizes proactive manager planning and allows their workforce of around 400 global employees to take care of their loved ones, such as sick children.
Those insights have informed product features like real-time shift swaps and instant time-off requests intended to reduce worker stress, Deputy’s CEO Silvija Martincevic, tells Fast Company.
In their recent engagement survey, 94% of Deputy’s employees agreed with the statement, “I’m able to work in a way that works for me,” citing flexible work hours and supportive management.
What working mothers can do
However, for mothers who aren’t at forward-thinking companies or don’t have understanding managers, Mel Goodman, a career strategist for working moms and founder of WorkMom, a collective for working mothers, offers the following advice:
At work, she notes, many high-achieving moms tend to protect their team’s outcomes at the expense of their personal boundaries. It’s better to understand that sick days are not normal work days and should not be treated as such.
She informs caregivers that it’s better to communicate their availability windows rather than apologize for interruptions, to be upfront about slower response times, and to choose one or two meaningful outputs instead of tackling a full to-do list.
On the home front, clear communication also helps. It’s best when parenting is “framed as a shared responsibility, not as ‘helping mom,’” Goodman says.
Instead of blaming partners for not helping enough, focus on making the invisible work visible, advises Goodman. Eve Rodsky’s Fair Play cards are a helpful tool for dividing household responsibilities.
Often, caretaking isn’t a true 50/50 split, as one partner’s job may carry more economic or professional risk. Focus on equity instead. “What matters is that the arrangement is intentional, agreed upon, and revisited over time,” says Goodman.
At the end of the day, company policy can only go so far if a woman is in an unbalanced relationship. “If one partner consistently resists stepping up, the issue is rarely logistics. It is usually a values conversation about respect, fairness, and whether both people truly believe that both careers and both well-being matter,” adds Goodman.
Finally, she advises, on high-demand days, try to carve out moments for personal care too—10 minutes of walking, exercising, or meditating—that can reset the nervous system. And don’t be afraid to cancel or simplify weekend plans as a recovery strategy, she says.
Even the most prepared caregivers can end up overwhelmed and exhausted this time of year—evidence that sick-child policies and flexible work practices are essential for real-life employees.
