Welcome to the Preschool Plague Years

Last September, my newly three-year-old daughter strode into preschool for the first time, sporting a ladybug shirt, red pants, and the particular high-wattage, full-dimple grin she usually reserves for dashing gleefully into our bedroom at seven-thirty in the morning. Like any parent, I was slightly teary and enormously, stupidly proud. How momentous it seemed, this new stage of life; how beautiful, to watch her start to spread her tender roots into the world. Or spread something, anyway. That was two hundred and one days ago and I have been sick for almost all of them.

This is not what people mean when they talk about “chronic illness.” In fact, there’s no medical terminology whatsoever for all the ailments your beloved child will introduce into your life. Consider croup, which will make your sweet-voiced angel sound like an enraged sea lion and cause you to spend four nights huddled with her on the bathroom floor, shower steam rolling over you like a manifestation of your supersaturated sleep deprivation. Consider norovirus, which produces more bodily effluence than the Augean stables. Consider the many maladies dedicated to specific parts of the toddler body: pink eye; strep throat; ear infection; hand, foot, and mouth disease. Consider the pediatric incarnations of old familiar diagnoses—bronchitis, pneumonia, influenza, COVID-19, RSV. Consider, finally, the common cold, which you will experience with a frequency, ferocity, and tenacity unrivalled since your own formerly innocent immune system was first exposed to this fallen and pestilential world.

Before I continue, let me state the obvious: we parents who contend only with everyday diseases, and only in their non-life-threatening incarnations—we are the lucky ones. Far graver illnesses can afflict the young, and I pray never to know the fear, agony, and powerlessness of witnessing such suffering. Like any mother, I would gladly contract every plague known to nature if it would spare my children pain. But my subject here is not those desolate and terrible hinterlands of parenthood. It is the entirely mundane world in which, for months on end, the liquid forms of Tylenol and Motrin never leave your grocery list. It’s the world in which you cancel, in a single season, a visit to out-of-town family, a romantic getaway, and Thanksgiving. It’s the world in which, during a brief, miraculous interlude of good health, the sound of a single sneeze can fill you with dread. Never mind the nuptials; “in sickness and in health” is what you should say when your kid is born.

In a perverse sense, my partner and I were lucky: our firstborn arrived in the middle of the coronavirus pandemic. On balance, this was not good timing. Trust me, you don’t want to go through pregnancy, childbirth, and early parenthood during a national emergency that makes all medical care fraught and the sustaining presence of family and friends an impossible fantasy. The isolation, the fear of contamination, the disruption of familiar routines to the point of barely being able to fathom what life was like beforehand: I can’t begin to tell you the number of times my partner and I asked each other, during those early months of our elder daughter’s life, “Is this parenthood or is this the pandemic?”

Still, although we didn’t realize it at the time, that global crisis had, for us, a private silver lining, bright as a column of mercury resting serenely at 98.6: until she was fifteen months old, our daughter didn’t have so much as a sniffle. For the next year and a half, as we entered the world of playdates and birthday parties, we congratulated ourselves on the fact that she seemed to have inherited my partner’s iron immune system: a fever here, a runny nose there, all stopped in their tracks in a day or two. Then came preschool.

As you know if you have a kid of your own, the collective noun for “toddler” is “superspreader.” At any given moment, half of all children under four are harboring a horrid illness while the other half are engaging in behavior so hygienically compromising it boggles the adult imagination. Never mind some contemplative thumb-sucking or the frank excavation of hardened snot from a stuffy nose; I am talking about the evolutionarily inexplicable instinct to touch things that should never be touched and taste things that should never be tasted. These latter include—to sample from Reddit threads with titles like “What has your small child licked recently?”—shopping carts, toilet seats, the bottoms of shoes, a flyswatter covered in freshly smashed fly, and the floors of airports, gas stations, and hospital waiting rooms. Nor do children reliably stop at mere licking. There are kids alive and well today who have eaten dead cockroaches, cat vomit, raccoon poop, used Band-Aids, and the blood-filled absorbent material in a package of raw chicken. I know of one child who ate her baby sister’s umbilical cord when it fell off.

All this is to say that, like air travel and Coachella, young children are optimized for spreading disease. You should fear any place they congregate—including the pediatrician’s office, where, last month, I contracted the worst flu of my life, eight days after our second daughter was born. I immediately isolated myself in our home office, thereby averting the horrible scenario in which our newborn got sick but creating the horrible scenario in which my freshly postpartum partner was solely responsible for a three-and-a-half-year-old and an infant. I will blame my hundred-and-three-degree fever for the fact that, of the two of us, I was the one who broke down, accurately but histrionically weeping over FaceTime about how I had missed half my daughter’s life.

I am still coughing from that flu a month later—or, at least, I think it’s from that flu. Who knows? Countless other germs lurk in my kid-filled environment, just waiting for me to touch the wrong door handle or, heaven forbid, inhale. Maybe I got pneumonia. Maybe I got bronchitis. Maybe I picked up one of the two-hundred-odd viruses that can cause the common cold—a statistical likelihood, since young kids generally bring home at least six to ten of these per year. No wonder I’ve been sick for so long; each of those colds can easily last two weeks, meaning this one type of illness alone can fell your family for a hundred and forty days per year. Since cold viruses are more transmissible in chilly weather, it’s perfectly possible for all those days to stack up consecutively. In short, come November, if you have kids, you might as well prepare, like an overwintering bear, to crawl into a cave of sickness and not emerge until spring.

To be clear: the worst thing about having a sick kid is having a sick kid. Upon becoming a parent, you enter into a lifelong contract to tend to your child’s well-being, enforceable by, basically, every atom of your existence. As it turns out, such contracts include many clauses, subclauses, terms, amendments, and riders, from instilling good manners to discouraging the drinking of bathwater, but none of them is as fundamental as keeping your offspring physically safe. As a result, even the most mundane illness can present something of an existential crisis. There is your beloved child, her forehead too pale, her cheeks too flushed, her enormous eyes gone glassy with fever, tacitly pleading with you, the omnipotent God of her tiny universe, to do something.

The problem is that there is so little to be done. Fevers can be treated with ibuprofen and acetaminophen, thank goodness; for everything else, good luck. Cough syrup is generally off-limits for kids under six, and the only alternative (and only after age one) is honey, which is allegedly effective at reducing cough but mostly effective at making your sick child sticky. Decongestants are likewise unsafe for small children. Instead, you can try humidifiers, which, depending on whom you ask, are either a must-have or a mold-breeding, disease-aerosolizing menace to your child.

Even acquiring a thermometer has become, in our modern times, a travail. During my own childhood, this crucial medical device was commonly available in only two forms: rectal, which involved a patient parent and a jar of Vaseline, and oral, which could only be used once your kid could be trusted not to bite down too hard and ingest glass shards and mercury. Nowadays, the U.S. no longer sanctions mercury thermometers, and the market for other ways to take a child’s temperature has ballooned to absurd proportions. You can get no-touch baby thermometers, infrared children’s thermometers, thermometers with built-in fever alarms, six-second thermometers, three-second thermometers, two-second thermometers, in-ear thermometers, underarm thermometers, temple thermometers (for the head, not for Yom Kippur), backlit thermometers for ease of reading at night, and thermometers that will store your child’s last fifty temperatures, as if every one of them were not already seared into your brain. Go ahead and get all of these, if you like. I assure you that at three in the morning, when your kid wakes up sobbing and you go into her room to discover her burning up in her bed, the no-touch thermometer will display an error symbol, the forehead thermometer will be out of batteries, and the in-ear thermometer will report a temperature of sixty-three degrees. At this point, the only thing you can do is what generations of parents before you have done: hold your child and comfort her and pray she will feel better in the morning.

Alas, the more likely scenario is that this plague will drag on and on: a runny nose, a sore throat, a lingering fever, a brief spell of feeling better that ends when your daughter tells you her ear hurts. You give her some more ibuprofen and a warm compress, because, these days, the wisdom on ear infections is watchful waiting. Two more days of malaise pass. On the following day, it starts to snow, a distraction so exciting that your daughter seems to forget she is sick. Only at four in the afternoon, with a foot of snow on the ground and more falling thickly, does she announce that her ear still hurts. Fifteen minutes later, she’s crying from the pain, so you call your pediatrician, only to learn that the office is closed because of snow.

Congratulations: you have just encountered an ironclad law of urgent medical situations, which is that they arise only on the Friday night of a holiday weekend or in the middle of a blizzard. While your partner sets about determining the least treacherous route to the urgent-care center, you gather coats, hats, mittens, and snacks, then bundle your kid into the car. It takes forty-five minutes to drive seven miles. But, mirabile dictu, when you arrive the place is still open and only ninety people are in line ahead of you. The doctor who eventually sees you promptly prescribes the antibiotic now you regret not having lied to procure at the first sign of ear pain. Instead, four days later and forty minutes past her bedtime, you give your sleepy daughter her first dose.

Is this drama finally over? It is not. The miracle drug works as promised; by morning, her ear feels fine. But, that night, you wake to her coughing like an emphysemic eighty-year-old. When you sit up, your head throbs, and you discover a patch of the Sahara, dry and burning, in the back of your throat. Quavery with incipient illness, you straggle into your daughter’s room to find her propped up in bed, pale and solemn in the glow of her night-light. To all of your inadequate offers of aid—another blanket? Some water? A teaspoon of adhesive-grade honey?—she offers a preternaturally polite “No, thank you.” Where, you wonder, did this impossibly stoic child come from? Not from you, obviously, because even as you sit beside her a tide of self-pity rises in tandem with your temperature: here we go again.

Allow me to lift my aching head from my pillow long enough to survey the larger scene. Ah, America! Amber waves of grain, liberty and justice for all, the only wealthy nation on earth without federally mandated paid sick leave. Somewhere over the water lies Norway, where working citizens take an average of roughly twenty-seven paid sick days each year, and Germany, where they can take up to seventy-eight weeks within a three-year span. Spain, France, China, Ethiopia, Algeria, Yemen, Angola, Uzbekistan: all these and many more provide at least a month of paid sick leave per year.

Meanwhile, here in the United States, the average private-sector employee gets seven days of paid sick leave, while nearly a quarter of such workers get none at all. I don’t feel well enough right now to muster enough outrage about this, so let’s just say that a nation that allegedly believes in the importance of family and hopes to boost its falling birth rate should probably accept that having kids means needing sick days. As it stands, American caregivers miss as many as a hundred and twenty-six million workdays each year, far too many of them unpaid, to care for themselves and their families during illnesses.

Still, though more humane policies could alleviate enormous amounts of financial stress, they wouldn’t solve the fundamental problem, which is that the job called parenthood comes with no sick leave at all. It doesn’t matter if you have dysentery, dengue fever, and the bubonic plague. It doesn’t matter if you live next door to doting grandparents or employ Mary Poppins or send your kids to a trilingual, STEM-focussed preschool with four teachers per student; common decency dictates that you can’t foist your contagious kid on someone else while you turn on Netflix and go back to bed. If you have young children, you are going to need to man up—although, in this case, women more often rise to the occasion—and perform at least some of the basic duties of parenthood.

This is, put bluntly, not fun. Before I met my partner, getting sick while living alone seemed totemic of everything I disliked about being single. Now it seems as luxurious as a week in the Caribbean. Imagine feeling ill and just sleeping! But many young children, inexplicably, do not get tired when they are sick. Give them a dose of ibuprofen and, for a few hours, they’re as good as new, clamoring to ride their bike to the playground while you want to curl up silently in a dark room.

Eventually, though, the medicine wears off, leaving your child with different needs that your sick self is equally taxed by meeting. First, she wants you to read to her, so you stash a cough drop in a strategic corner of your mouth, settle her onto your lap, and start in on “The Tale of Tom Kitten”—which, mercifully, she has demanded so often that you can recite whole pages while closing your eyes. Then she wants a smoothie, so you slog into the kitchen and toss blueberries, bananas, milk, and yogurt into the blender. She downs it, to your surprise, then requests a bagel with cream cheese. Hopeful that her surging appetite is a sign of returning health, you oblige. After that, she wants more stories in her bedroom, and furthermore she wants you to carry her there. You are about to insist that she walk when you register the pleading in her eyes and the pallor in her cheeks, so you lift her up into your arms—whereupon, without warning, the entire meal she has just consumed comes back up in the form of two gallons of vomit.

The truly remarkable thing about parenthood is that the only thing you think in that moment is Oh, my poor baby. You stagger with her into the bathroom, strip her down, clean her up, get her into fresh p.j.s, change your own clothes, and are steeling yourself to face the remaining mess when your partner—sicker than you, pregnant, heroic—rises up from bed to take care of your daughter and mop the floor and wash the vomit off the cat.

Only some of this gets better when your child does. True, it’s a relief to see her restored to health, but, assuming you yourself remain sick, your needs and hers are now even more incompatible. Many parents, in fact, report that the worst-case scenario is not when your whole family is ill but when the adults are miserable and the under-six cohort feels just fine.

Old hands at this situation have plenty of advice for first-timers, all of which boils down to this: lower your standards as far as possible without inviting a visit from Child Protective Services. Lock the doors, unplug the appliances, and leave the children to their own devices—a phrase that didn’t used to have technological overtones, but if there were ever a time to waive your no-screens policy, along with all your other policies, this is it. Your six-year-old wants to watch “Night of the Living Dead”? Go for it. Your four-year-old wants to eat ice cream on a hotdog bun? Sure thing. Together they want to finger-paint the toddler? Have fun. As for you: keep an ear out for genuine screams and excessive silence. Change dirty diapers and intervene in activities that would result in calling 911. Otherwise, divide and conquer with any available grownup and rest as much as you can.