What Do Parents Think
About the Vaccines?
Ilya Burdman, who works in cybersecurity,
recalls how his parents suffered from COVID-
19 during the summer of 2020, before the
vaccine was available.

“They had to go through two weeks of
pretty much not being able to get up. They
had difficulty breathing, and I don’t want that
experience for my children,” he says. “It’s
something I would try to prevent as much
as possible.

“The vaccine is very important to have,” he
adds. “It’s extremely safe, and I think COVID
will not be going away anytime soon.”
Both the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines have
been linked in rare cases, particularly among
young men, to myocarditis, a condition that
causes an inflammation of the heart muscle.

However, concern about this side effect could be
reduced by the lower doses that children would
receive of the Pfizer vaccine. In Pfizer’s trials,
the smaller doses produced similar antibody
responses to those seen in a study of 16- to
25-year-old individuals who received full doses.

Some parents worry about the relatively
small size of the trials and about a lack of
long-term data on the safety of the shots. In
general, parents tend to be skeptical of new
“I am at the point
where my kids’
mental well-being
has to take priority.”
—Jacqueline Renfrow
vaccines. For example, while
the varicella vaccine, which
protects against chicken
pox, was highly effective and
showed few side effects, parents
were hesitant to adopt it once the
FDA approved it in 1995, with only
one-third of eligible adolescents fully
immunized by 2008.

Sharone Lerner Cheskis says her 13-year-
old son, then 12, was among the first to get the
vaccine when it was approved for his age group.

“He was bouncing off the walls excited,” she
says. “It’s really made us feel more comfortable.

He’s around a lot of other kids, so it’s important
for us that he has that layer of protection.

“For our younger son,” who’s 9, “we’re going
to do the exact same thing,” she adds. “Both
my boys play sports. They’re in public school—
we’re just around a lot of people.”
Cheskis is a speech-language pathologist at
Prince George’s County Public Schools. She
says that the pandemic has been hard for many
of the kids that she sees since it has prevented
them from talking with people outside of
their families.

“There’s been a certain amount of drop in
skill,” she says, adding that the vaccine would
help “kids to get back to closer to where they
were” before COVID-19.

Lucy Leibowitz, a pediatric psychologist,
says it is “too soon” to say how the pandemic
overall will impact children in the long term, as
“we are still very much in it.”
She plans to vaccinate her 7-year-old child
as soon as she can, which would bring“peaceof
mind” when visiting family. However, her
4-year-old child would remain ineligible.

30 Washington FAMILY NOVEMBER 2021
“It would probably be similar to how things
were when my husband and I got vaccinated,”
she says. “It’s not drastically going to change
what we’re doing.”
However, Leibowitz says, changing public
health guidelines and conditions can be
confusing for kids.

“I took off my mask while talking to one
of my kiddo’s friend’s parents at an outdoor
playdate, and my 7-year-old said, ‘Mom, put
your mask back on,’” she says, “I explained, ‘We
are both vaccinated. We are outside, and I made
the determination that this is safe.’”
As the pandemic ebbs and flows and as
vaccines and more information become
available, Leibowitz advises parents to be open
with their children about their decisions about
participating in certain activities.

“Rather than just saying, ‘You have to do
this,’” she says, “explain the reasons why you
do this in kid-appropriate language.” n
Mid-Atlantic Media staff writer Ben Kahn
contributed to this article. This story originally
appeared in the Washington Jewish Week.

MOTHER/DAUGHTER: KATE_SEPT2004; BOYS: FLUXFACTORY/E+
with the idea of their children getting
vaccinated. In
mid-September, around when schools reopened and
hospitalizations and deaths soared
due to the highly contagious
delta variant, the Kaiser Family
Foundation conducted a
nationally representative
survey. Thirty-four percent of
parents interviewed say they
would have their children
ages 5 to 11 vaccinated as
soon as possible, up from
26% in July.

For Rockville
resident Jacqueline Renfrow, whose three
children are younger than 12, the
vaccine cannot come quickly enough,
“I am at the point where my kids’ mental
well-being has to take priority,” she says.

“Watching them over the course of almost
two years—they were not themselves—it was
hard to watch.”
The mental and emotional toll isolation was
taking on her children eventually reached a
tipping point. Renfrow sends her kids to after-
school activities—in-person and masked-up.

“I just cannot worry every minute about
them, so I throw a mask on them and take the
proper precautions,” she says. “They cannot
stay inside forever.”