If someone's spouse is having a mental health crisis, dealing with that during work hours is not generally permitted, because a spouse is not a child.

That type of thing is generally acute, not chronic. If someone needs to duck out of work on short notice for the rest of the day to help a spouse in crisis, that absolutely should be generally permitted, and I think most tech employers would be ok with that.

If this crisis required the employee to take several weeks off, it would require scrambling and maybe require some unpaid leave, but it would get done.

But that has nothing to do with what's going on now. We have a chronic situation where parents need to take care of their kids all day, every day, for every week and month that this pandemic shuts down schools and other child care services. You can't address this with an afternoon off or temporary leave of absence. This requires a complete change in expectations. You can't pause child care for 8 hours while mom and dad work. You can't even pause it for 30 minutes.

I'll admit that I'm not at all familiar with legal obligations to medical conditions for employers.

However, anyone dealing with a "crisis", and also more explicitly a "mental health crisis", should not be punished in their job, esp during everyone-remote-pandemic-time (though overall, but I have had pretty cushy jobs since joining industry).

Maybe you have a specific example where the "adult, not child" thing mattered in a crisis, but that would make me very disappointed with my company, with HR, and compel me to start doing my best to look elsewhere for more empathic colleagues.

I don't particularly want to post about my employer today.

Taking care of elderly parents, siblings, or other family members.