Day care sick day incentives
Oliver’s school has a rule: 3 runny poops, and you get sent home. They have a few other objective measure of whether or not a kid’s sick, but that’s the one we’re interested in with Oliver’s current GI situation.
If you get sent home, you can’t come back until you’re “24 hours symptom free”, which basically means: “Don’t come back tomorrow.”
So, if you’re a parent that would like to avoid missing work, you have to do some tricky calculus when you decide whether to take a baby to school. If you take him and he gets sent home, you miss 1.5-2 days of work. If you don’t take him, you’re choosing to miss one day, in hopes that he’s well enough to take tomorrow.
It’s this interesting, high stakes game of health and probability that I never thought I’d be playing, but the school has done a good job of creating an incentive structure that encourages you to keep a sick kid home.
The other side of the incentive structure is whacked out though: the teacher and school are paid the same no matter how many babies they send home as “sick”, so we’ve had a few cases where we had to pick up what appeared to be a perfectly healthy Oliver.
