In a way, yes. Good healthy families are a core of a functioning society. However some examples you gave:

Why do you need a doctor’s appointment in the middle of the day?

Unless you’re in a society where doctors are available in the evening, this is a silly question

Why do you need to go pick up a prescription at lunch time

Again, depends on the pharmacist’s opening hours

like why can’t you work through lunch?

This is just stupid completely

They need the job a lot more. They have a little girl!

This makes sense, as again, someone with a child needs to provide for a family

Clearly they need it more than the the person who has a disabled spouse, because kids are way more important than an adult dependent!

This is stupid and a disabled spouse or any dependent should also be taken into consideration

We can’t fire this person, they have kids! Let’s choose someone who doesn’t have a family.

This makes sense. Some people need more money than others. That’s a basic fact. You or I would find more value in £1000 than a billionaire would.

Society flourishes when there are more middle class families flourishing. (By “more” middle class, I mean raising people to the middle class and maintaining those who are as well.) It is natural order that we should make society an easier environment to have a family in, rather than harder. Lest you end up like Japan or China with a declining population

Society was wrong when it started to hate women who had more kids and lived off of child benefits (and maybe a husband’s wage helping as well). If they’re actually doing a decent job at parenting, let them.

By the same logic a disabled spouse doesn’t mean you get any additional consideration right?

“I nutted in a girl once, I’m better than you”

No. Everyone should get the same treatment, as if they had children.

My opinion on this, it fully depends.

I fully agree that people should be empathetic to people with kids because there are events that are outside of their control. This being said I don’t think they should be sympathetic to it. At the end of the day it isn’t that person’s problem that someone else has a kid, so therefore they shouldn’t be affected by it. Being said the world isn’t a perfect place and if you straight out don’t show any sympathy period you’re going to make enemies Having a kid should not be a get out of jail free card for any type of commitment, no if ands or buts.

Since you mentioned the professional World I’ll keep it more leaning towards that, a worker with a kid should not be getting preferable treatment to someone without a kid unless it is something that is directly out of that person’s control. A kid being sick is one thing, leaving early due to a doctor’s appointment is a whole different thing. They make sick days and they make vacation days for that, if the company is willing to work around your appointments that’s great, but that should be a treatment that they are given to everyone regardless of if you have a kid or not.

As for the lunch example that you gave, without getting too far off topic I firmly believe that that shouldn’t be happening. Regardless of if you have a kid or not. Depending on your contract you’re entitled to a lunch, and in most companies that lunch is unpaid. If I’m not being paid my company is not going to dictate what I’m doing. Lunch period Is very often the period that I use to be able to do the things like what you mentioned such as going to the store or going to the bank, that’s none of my employers buisness what I’m doing during that time.

in the professional World shit happens, managers will give preferable treatment to people they like and to the more efficient workers. Some managers also struggle to see the difference between empathy and sympathy and go a little too far in worker preference, this doesn’t mean that it’s right. This is a human trait, it’s against our nature to go against it. However as cold-hearted as it sounds employees life outside of the job should not be a problem of the employer. I’m not saying they should be the first one on The Chopping block, but I am saying that if that worker is less efficient, or ends up working less than higher other workers, the fact that they have a kid at home should not be taken into account.

Please note that this post is not including if your country has laws prohibiting certain actions. Such as in the US FMLA states that once the worker has been with the company for a year they can be entitled to up to 6 months of job protected unpaid leave as long as it’s being used by one of their eligible statuses, and one of these is if I remember my paperwork is caretaking of a dependant or immediate family

Depends on the situation. If the parent(s) look absolutely done with life because their crotch goblins are draining the very life from them, I’d do shit like let them go ahead of me in line even if they have hella shit and I just have 1 thing. Let them get on their way and get some rest.

Like, I’m thinking more about the parents than the kids unless the parents are being Karens.

Working class trying to strip other working class of rights and privileges. Yes parents of children should get considerations according to their need.

Fuck no

Up until the last few years I’d hear the same argument about smokers taking breaks. Think the solution is to just keep heading ceos till things improve.

I’m a parent, and I don’t want special treatment. Some consideration would be nice, but honestly I just want every employee to be treated like adults.

I don’t have kids myself, but I understand that it’s the employers fault they don’t extend the same privileges to me, not the parents fault for receiving the privilege.

There’s always some sort of excuse with them. Have to go pick him up from the bus stop, have to go pick him up from school because they got in trouble, dance recital during the middle of the day, always something.

I am a single parent and work the same hours per timesheet and get the same allotment of personal leave per year as everybody else at my employer.

If I happen to use that personal leave to pick up a kid who threw up in their classroom while somebody else uses it to see their optometrist or attend a funeral isn’t really anybody’s business.

I take one early afternoon each week to take my kid to an after school activity, this puts a weekly 2 or 3 hour deficit in my timesheet that I either make up by working a bit longer on the other days or if the sheet doesn’t balance I make up the difference by spending some annual leave. (I try to avoid using AL like this because I would rather save it for holidays but it is occasionally required.)

I don’t telegraph all of this timesheet accounting to my colleagues, they will know which day I’m leaving early that term and the rest isn’t really their business. At the end of the day/month/year I have my schedule OKed by my line manager and work the commitments of my contract.

But when it comes to ordinary normal people who don’t have kids, it feels like there’s a lot more scrutiny. Why do you need a doctor’s appointment in the middle of the day? Why do you need to go pick up a prescription at lunch time, like why can’t you work through lunch?

If your employer / manager is second guessing your leave thats an issue between you and them and shouldn’t have your looking at your peers with resentment.

In practice, kids provide more good excuses to work around unrealistic expectations, like needing fifteen minutes to pick up something. There’s a good emotional excuse in “I need to take my kid to the doctor”, much more than “the Elden Ring expansion came out”. If your boss is being unreasonable, you’ll need something good to dissuade them. Unfortunately for everyone involved, kid stuff just happens a lot less predictably and a lot more during office hours than (your own) adult stuff. Kids get sick more, do more dangerous things, are more vulnerable, and have weirder schedules than adults. They also can’t really get around by themselves up until a certain age, and at certain age ranges they probably shouldn’t be going to doctor’s appointments without adults either, even if they can get there by bike or by public transport themselves.

As for kid stuff happening during the day: that’s just how kid stuff works a lot of the time, unfortunately. Doctors and schools are open for only so many hours a day. It’s not like parents get that time off, they need to do chores they’d rather not be doing when they’re away from work. However, if you need to see a doctor or pick up medicine, you shouldn’t be restricted to super uncomfortable times because you’re not a child.

I don’t see why a kid would be more important than a disabled spouse, or any spouse for that matter. If there’s a family concern where you need to be present, kids shouldn’t get preferential treatment. When it comes to things like being available in your free time or being put forward as a backup, your time should be as valuable as anyone’s time. However, something to consider is that in some occasions parents will negotiate their contracts to be exempted from certain things, often at a cut in pay or with something else to make up for it; in those cases your time is legally worth less than theirs, but that’s down to contract negotiation.

As for being fired and other stuff where dependents may suffer, I think that’s only logical. It often doesn’t matter which team member gets fired for economic reasons, so a compassionate boss should probably fire causing the least amount of suffering. Someone’s going to feel the pain, but unless there’s a good reason to fire someone else, a single person having their life upset by getting fired will be preferential to a family of four having their life upset.

They already are. Months of parental leave, come back, make another child, get another couple of months off. If the money is it there to allow this, why can’t we get some kind of sabbatical

Yes and no. Everyone deserves the same benefits here. The issue isn’t why someone with kids gets a free pass, but why you don’t get the same offering. Why should someone have to work harder because they’re infertile, gay, or otherwise unable to reproduce?