Always heard that the first year of daycare involves a lot of sickness for not just the little one but the whole family. How did you handle that? Did you and your spouse have to take a lot of sick time off? Did it hurt your work performance leading to negative impact on your career / job security?

We were sick every month for ~ 1 year after our daughter started daycare. Luckily everyone was pretty understanding as most people either had kids themselves and got it, or had nieces and nephews that they were very close to/with

I think it depends on your health/immunity overall. Neither my husband nor I has become ill from our son being in daycare (he is 2 years and 3 months old), but of course baby has been ill a handful of times. He has had a few colds, a fever, HFM disease, and pink eye, and I feel like that's not *too* bad.

I still took quite a bit of sick days to care for baby nonetheless, but I probably could've gotten away with more WFH days (instead of time off) given how much babies sleep when they're sick.

The effect on career progression and my work image has almost entirely been dependent on my manager. This is in industry though, F100 company, and utilization isn't a metric of course. One manager I had was a mom of young kids and was completely supportive and understanding. My next manager was a middle-aged guy with an ex-wife, a pre-teen, and a SAHM as a new wife, and he was always very passive-aggressive toward his directs who had kids and needed to take time off unexpectedly

It was awful with our son. Daycare was constantly calling for us to pick up our son. My husband had limited PTO and I was working in a hospital at the time. WFH was not an option and I was only working 2-3 days a week. We swapped who would take days off. At one point, we considered hiring a nanny to be at home with him. Luckily, it finally evened out after a year.

We have a 16 month old who started daycare at 6 months in Oct. Husband and I both work corporate jobs with WFH flexibility but demanding clients. The days the kid was truly sick weren't the problem, it was the 24 hour since a fever rule that crushed us. Luckily, supportive grandparents who are retired and didn't mind helping on the not-sickly-but-cant-go-to-school days got us through. January - April was rough but since then I don't think he's missed a day.

I’ve been lucky and had an understanding manager that let me work from home. Sickness is temporary and won’t affect overall performance unless you have shitty superiors that are waiting for an in

Kid germs are hardcore. It takes a bit to get a family's immune system to fight those nasty buggers, but it will happen. Until then, best to keep sick kids home and try to keep them in their own space so the illness doesn't spread. Trade off who stays home from work with the child, and get other family members as backup support (grandparents, aunts, uncles, friends) to help out if needed. Explain to your employer if you'll need an extended time away and possibly WFH or work on weekends if they allow it.

Don’t worry you will come out much more sicker and broke after 2-3 years. But much wiser and happier at the same time. Will take the pain in a heartbeat beat again.

Not going to sugarcoat it, it’s truly awful and absolutely impacts performance unless you have a village. We couldn’t take a vacation for the first two years because we used all our time off for sick days. You will get through it. It is what it is.

It was brutal. I pretty much used all of my sick days. I would say it was more stressful on me, but no one said anything directly to me (pretty much everyone was older than me and had gone through it with their kids).