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As a parent of young children I've found that I need my phone on any time my children are not with me. Calls from school or day care don't always come from the same number, so I answer every call when my kids are in the care of others (but none otherwise).


Then practice keeping your phone in your pocket for increasingly long periods of time. You may need to build up to this and to develop some level of control.


Why? What happens if you don’t have it, just as parents didn’t have them for centuries?


Child care now requires parents to be readily available, especially to pick up children who are sick. A century ago, child care providers were expected to care for sick children until the parent arrived. Failure to be responsive would be a violation of the child care agreement.


Is this really true? There are millions of parents who are unreachable while working. A surgeon isn’t going to be able to leave in the middle of surgery to pick up their kid from child care.

My kid got sick at daycare one time when I was over an hour away. They just had to stay there while I worked my way back.

It happens, and it is handled normally.


I don't think that's a counter example. Our day care requested sick kids to be picked up within an hour. A single late pickup of a sick kid due to traffic/distance would be handled normally. An unreachable parent who turns off their phone and is extremely delayed, especially on multiple occasions is a very different thing.

When we looked at in-home child care, one of the options was a nanny who would care for kids even when the kids were sick. So I'm sure the rapid-pickup-of-sick-kids policy isn't universal. However, our day care had that policy and we made sure we knew who was "on-call" to get kids when important meetings or work travel impacted our availability.




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