You just never know what will get some people good and fired up. My snow day column, of all things, has gotten me a few critical comments now, and one of them definitely has a point. A reader took me to task for making a generalization about how snow days can often throw off a working mom’s schedule, but, as he pointed out, in his office there are two men who are first in line for “snow day” duty.

So, I generalized, and for that I apologize. Of course, I should have said working parent.

At first I was feeling really guilty, thnking I was a hypocrite for poking fun at my disgruntled e-mailer the other day when it turned out I’d done the same thing (made a sexist assumption). But here’s the difference, as I see it: “Ben” was making an assumption about my specific home life based on, well, based on nothing, since if he’d read a few more of my columns he would know I was a working mom. I was generalizing about a group of people based on my experiences–still not okay, necessarily, but in any generalization there is some–sometimes much–truth. And the truth is, in the vast majority of families I know, the mother is the one who takes on the most responsibility for snow days and sick days–regardless of whether she’s working or not.

Even in our household, where we have a pretty even partnership, it’s generally assumed that I’m the one who will make it work if one of the kids has to stay home. Now, part of that is because I work mostly from home, which you can technically do with kids in the house. Technically–but it doesn’t always work out that way, especially if a child is sick and needy. But if I have a big deadline on the day that school’s cancelled or snot is flowing, I would have to ask my husband to take the day off, and though he’d probably do it, there would be some grumbling and gnashing of teeth first.

What about you? In your family, who is the automatic stay-home-on-sick-and-snow-days parent? Do you take turns? Work it out depending on who’s got more going on that day? Or does one parent or the other stay home most of the time? If that’s the case, did you set it up that way by design…or default? If you’re an at-home parent, then what about the dual-working couples you know?