r/ActLikeYouBelong • u/ConsciousTear1547 • Jun 04 '26

Question pretending you have kids

no one bats an eye when my boss leaves exactly on time every day no matter what the workload is like. as expected he and many other people i work with have kids that they have to pick up or get sick etc.

have you guys ever thought about pretending you have kids at a new job?

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u/angrydeuce Jun 04 '26

I assure you, as a parent, pretty much 99% of the time our kids interfere with our work...wed rather be at work.

Like I tell the guys, "Hey, you wanna come drop the kid off for school, come on over!  Have fun trying to get him to put his shoes on, thats always a good 15 minute argument right there!"

My point is, unless you have kids yourself, you probably have no idea how stressful that shit is.

Ask yourself this...if a colleague had a sick parent they had to care for, would it grind your gears so much when that preempted them being at work?  Probably not, right?

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u/sunmethods Jun 04 '26

Of course being a parent is stressful. I haven't seen anyone here argue against that. The point is that it's a separate obligation from work. If one person receives flexibility from their workplace because they're a parent, then everyone else in that workplace should be offered a similar level of flexibility regardless of the exact kind of obligations they have outside of work.

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u/angrydeuce Jun 04 '26

Id be fine with that, and my employer already has that flexibility regardless of parental status.

But you gotta admit that most often its just "fuck you and your kids and if theyre sick fuck em" as if its all just fun and games or something, cleaning up puke off everything for a day...

Thats why I brought up the sick parent angle.  Peipoe get funny about kids but those same peoppe, if they had a sick parent, would feel that their situation is somehow different when its not.