Parents of children who are not eligible for Covid vaccines are struggling, Elizabeth Tracey reports

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If you’re a parent of a child younger than 12 years of age you may be struggling with the simplest of decisions right now regarding their welfare, a recent survey suggests, largely because of concerns about COVID-19. Helen Hughes, a pediatrician at Johns Hopkins, says she is hearing this from parents again and again.

Hughes: I do personally really struggle with the balance of the risks of contracting the coronavirus with the risks of kind of not allowing children to exist in the world. You have to take your own family dynamic and your own children and make the best decision you can with the information you have, and then those decisions may change week to week, month to month, depending on the new information you have. It’s a really exhausting time to be a parent of young kids, because those normal decisions, which were always fraught with difficulties, where do you send your child to school, what activities do you do with them, now have these additional layers of confusion and frustration and anxiety.  :34

Hughes is hopeful vaccines will be provided for younger children soon. At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.