- Parents who disagree over whether their children should get vaccinated against COVID-19 face a serious dilemma.
- To help resolve the issue, experts recommend each parent draw up a list of pros and cons on their position and reflect on how past disagreements were solved.
- They add that a child over age 12 should be consulted.
- If all else fails, they recommend talking with a medical professional, clergy member, family friend, or close friend.
When COVID-19 vaccinations became available for children 12 to 17 years old, Susanna was overjoyed.
Ready to help her children move past masking and to move past her own anxiety, she told her husband she’d be booking their appointments.
That’s when things went south.
“He’s completely against it,” Susanna told Healthline. “He is, as our youngest child likes to say, ‘radicalized.’ He spends most of his time reading right-leaning sources, and it just snowballed.”
In Ohio, Selina Silvey-Gibson found herself on the other side of that coin.
“I’ll be perfectly honest, I was quite skeptical (about vaccinating her children),” she told Healthline. “It’s not a ‘the government is going to track us with this’ thing for me. It’s more the speed the approval came.”
When she told her husband she did not want to vaccinate their children, “We argued. He was at ‘we want this,’ and I was at ‘no way in hell,’” Silvey-Gibson said.
What happens when two parents disagree on whether to give their child the COVID-19 vaccine?
It’s challenging now that children age 12 and older can be vaccinated, with even younger children’s eligibility looming on the horizon.
Source: healthline