Month: August 2021

COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) — The vaccinations that U.S. schoolchildren are required to get to hold terrible diseases like polio, measles, tetanus and whooping cough in check are way behind schedule this year, threatening further complications to a school year already marred by COVID-19. The lag was caused by pandemic-related disruptions last year to routine doctor's visits, summer and sports camps at which kids usually get their immunizations. Now, pediatricians and educators are scrambling to ensure that backlogs don't keep kids from school or leave them vulnerable to contagious diseases. “It’s a big deal,” said Richard Long, executive director of the Learning First Alliance, a partnership of education organizations that has mounted a public outreach campaign. “We’re going to have kids getting...

The decision to give out extra doses of Moderna and Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccines pits federal health officials who say the shots may not protect people from severe disease in the future against the public-health experts who disagree with their logic. “It just doesn’t make sense on the surface,” said Dr. Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. “This whole effort of giving a third dose will, frankly, do little to get us on top of this pandemic because the issue here is not boosting the vaccinated. The issue is vaccinating the unvaccinated.” The majority of COVID-19 hospitalizations and deaths are occurring in people who are unvaccinated. Only about 60% of the U.S. population who qualify for a shot are fully immunized, though vaccin...

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With the Delta variant of Covid-19 infecting more children, many parents are worried about how to keep their unvaccinated young kids safe as schools reopen and extracurricular activities resume. The best protection against Delta, doctors and public health officials say, is vaccination. But that doesn’t directly help children under 12, who are ineligible for the shots. So parents must weigh the risks and benefits of fall activities, from in-person school to sports, play dates and birthday parties. Most parents by now know the basics: Masks reduce transmission and outdoors is safer than indoors. Beyond that, doctors suggest some principles to guide decision-making this fall. Give priority to your most important activities, they say, and skip others. Within y...

These are not kids demanding mental health days. "School refusing" kids do not refuse for just a day or two, but for weeks, months, sometimes semesters on end. One child I work with refused to attend school due to profound social anxiety, fearful that other kids would ignore him, make fun of him, or bully him. Another teen was deeply depressed about her appearance and could not stand the idea of peers seeing her and potentially judging her. And a high school sophomore client fell far behind in tests and assignments, and feared facing his teachers, so he refused to attend school for the remainder of the semester. Many school refusing kids suffer a combination of these stressors. With the increase in adolescent depression and anxiety over the past several years, I see this problem getting ...