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Column: Kids as young as 12 are cleared to get the COVID-19 vaccine. How parents can ease their fears.

Chicago Tribune
May 11, 2021

Trevon Howard, a 6th grader at Talcott Fine Arts and Museum Academy, has listened intently, and a bit nervously, as his teachers and the other grown-ups chronicle their COVID-19 vaccine side effects.

“I worry that the side effects could be way more harsh on me than on them,” Howard said. “It’s just a fear I have.”

At the same time, he’s eager for his life to start looking more like it did prepandemic. He wants to return to in-person school five days a week. He wants to see his favorite cousins.

“Last summer, my mom and aunt had all this stuff planned,” he said. “A water park, we were going to meet up with my cousins — all that was canceled. It’s just a lot. To not be able to see your family, it’s hard.”

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration cleared the first coronavirus vaccine for emergency use in kids as young as 12 on Monday, meaning kids now get a turn at protecting themselves and their communities from a potentially deadly virus.

“Kids have had to pay a really high price for COVID,” said Kate Benton, clinical psychologist at Ann and Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago. “In a lot of ways, they’ve been asked to do the most and give up the most.”

They’re also swimming around in the same cultural waters as adults, which means they’re acutely aware of the national dialogue around the COVID-19 vaccine. The side effects, the hesitancy, the rollout inequities, the misinformation that often parades as truth — it’s all right there on their phones and laptops and tablets, the same ones they’ve been relegated to learning and socializing on for so much of the past 15 months.

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So it’s understandable when they’ve got concerns about receiving the shots. And, mental health experts say, it’s critical that parents and other caretakers take those concerns seriously.

“They had to give up sports seasons, music, drama, huge events,” Benton said. “If they’re feeling disenfranchised right now, that’s a fair thing to express. And a parent should absolutely validate that.”

Howard’s mom, Theresa Pickett, said she and her son have been researching multivitamins and immune-supporting supplements together since the start of the pandemic. Researching the vaccine together, she said, felt like a natural next step.

“He has feelings about it and I want to hear them,” Pickett said. “We have long talks about all of it. That’s the gift and the curse of being home all the time.”

Benton encourages parents to ask open-ended questions to gauge how their kids are feeling about receiving the shot.

“Chances are they know your opinion already,” Benton said. “If you ask questions that are neutral and don’t dismiss their opinions, you can explore the issue together and have a good, meaningful discussion.”

Louis J. Kraus, professor and chief of child and adolescent psychiatry at Rush University Medical Center, said parents can’t effectively allay fears until they know what exactly those fears are.

“Depending what they’re looking at,” Kraus said, “kids are going to see a lot of misinformation.”

It’s important, he said, to help them sort fact from fiction, even as you emphasize that the vaccine won’t harm them.

“Tens of millions of people have received the vaccine by now, and it’s incredibly safe and effective,” Kraus said. “Kids take all kinds of vaccines every year that are recommended by the American Academy of Pediatrics that potentially have equivalent levels of potential side effects.”

Parents may point out to their kids the dramatic decrease in child mortality rates in the last century — largely thanks to vaccinations, Kraus said.

They may also point out, he said, that one of the first thing Jonas Salk did after he invented the polio vaccine was bring home a set of needles and inoculate his own kids. (“The point of that was to demonstrate my father’s confidence in the vaccine,” Peter Salk said in an Associated Press interview last year. “But it was also, from my father’s side and my mother’s side, ‘Let’s get these kids protected.’”)

If your child has a food allergy, a chronic illness or any other condition that’s causing them particular concern, Kraus said to schedule an appointment with your child’s pediatrician or specialist to answer those questions directly. The COVID-19 vaccine was developed and researched at an accelerated pace, and the guidance is, in many cases, still evolving.

Kraus said his own 21-year-old son was only recently cleared to receive the COVID-19 vaccine after months of being told his earlier leukemia diagnosis made him ineligible.

Dora Castro-Ahillen, child life service manager at Northwestern Medicine Central DuPage Hospital, said children with autism or sensory processing disorders may benefit from a vaccination rehearsal of sorts.

“It’s important to know what are some of the things they are going to feel, smell, hear — anything that helps them prepare,” Castro-Ahillen said. “You may even practice cleaning the spot with an alcohol wipe so they know how that might feel.”

If you know the pharmacy or location where your child is likely to receive the vaccine, Castro-Ahillen said, take a couple of walks around it in advance of the appointment so it feels familiar. And give them a vaccine job.

“It could honestly be holding still,” she said. “Or taking deep breaths. Any task that can give their brain something else to focus on in that moment other than the vaccine.”

Benton encourages parents to frame the vaccine as a way for kids to reclaim some control over a situation that has left them feeling powerless as they’ve lost cherished rituals and routines and, tragically, loved ones.

“This is when they get the opportunity to make their community safer and their school safer and move us in the direction of herd immunity,” she said.

And it’s OK, Kraus said, to talk about what happens if young people don’t get vaccinated.

“The reality is the numbers have gone down tremendously, but people are still getting infected and still dying,” he said. “We used to think college-age kids were relatively immune from COVID and all of a sudden huge numbers of them were getting it. It would be naive to think it’s not going to effect younger kids if they’re not vaccinated. Let’s nip this in the bud.”

And let’s lay the groundwork for good, lifelong habits. There are tremendously valuable lessons baked into the vaccine conversation, after all: the importance of turning to reputable, fact-based sources for information; trusting medical experts with your medical questions; taking steps to protect your own health and safety; considering the greater good of your community, for starters.

“It won’t be long until your kids are making their own medical decisions,” Benton said. “It’s important that parents be addressing these things as you go. Otherwise you’re leaving kids on their own to make sense of really complicated stuff and really emotionally charged stuff.”

Join the Heidi Stevens Balancing Act Facebook group, where she continues the conversation around her columns and hosts occasional live chats.

hstevens@chicagotribune.com

Twitter @heidistevens13

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