Reporting Your Child Absent: Sick Days and Dispensation Requests
The morning phone call when your child is ill, when a doctor's note is needed, and how to write the short formal request to excuse them for a family occasion.
Your child wakes up with a fever. It is 7:20 in the morning, you have to be at work, and now you have to make a phone call in German.
This is one of the most predictable conversations in Swiss life — and one of the shortest. Four sentences and you are done. Which means it is entirely learnable in advance, on a calm day, so that the phone call on the difficult morning is easy.
The second half of this lesson is the other kind of absence: a planned one, for a family or religious occasion. That one is written, not spoken, and it follows a simple pattern.
Key phrases to know
- Ich rufe an, weil meine Tochter heute krank ist. – I'm calling because my daughter is ill today.
- Was hat sie? – What's wrong with her?
- Sie hat Fieber und Halsschmerzen. – She has a fever and a sore throat.
- Ich melde sie ab. – I'll report her absent.