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How do you quell the anxiety for a child that is well aware of his or her surroundings? My son is one of those wonderful kinds of Apsies. My DH is an Aspie that love his news. My son hears the stuff going on about H1N1. He could not shut down last night due to the HIGH level of anxiety due to the news and his parents talking about it. He was first hysterical about teh shot then to find out about it being mass given out at school--OH BOY you would have thought that the world was coming to an end. Now not only is he scared about getting the "shot" but also about going to school and his being "herded" in to the lunchroom and being given the shot without his parents say so. He wants us to do everything we can to stop this for him and all other kids.

I know that he is right. I remember all to well being taken to get the smallpox vaccine in 1970. It was very scary for a kindergartener to be put in the lunchroom with 300-400 other students in the elementary school and be given a shot for which at the time they did not tell you what they were doing. For me it came on the heel of having been out of school for 3 weeks with massive leg pains ( that turned out to be that the muscles and ligament s were growing faster than the bones and caused me great leg pain).

As a parent, we want to protect our children from all forms of ill. But even telling him that we have a plan in place that prevents them from doing this, does not calm the fears. It is bad enough that we as adults are being feared into doing stuff, but now we have to calm the fears of our children that do not always understand what is going on. OR if they do, it causes new anxiety in an world that causes them enough anxiety.

What is a parent to do?