3 Tips To Help Your Child Cope With Vaccines

Getting your child vaccinated is one of the most important elements of infant and child health. We have written before about the importance of vaccinations to public health and ensuring your own child is protected from avoidable infectious disease. Hawthorne Clinic supports the vital work being done to ensure all children receive these vaccinations.

Getting an injection at any age is never fun. Helping to prepare your child to come to terms with this process is an important part of ensuring the pain and stress of immunization is minimised.

Here are three tips on helping your children through the vaccination process:

• Be honest and clear in your communication – be honest, don’t hide what the appointment is for or that it may hurt. Immunisation is a small thing, but in a small person’s life it’s a huge deal and it is an opportunity to build trust with your children.

• Do not join the hysteria – don’t build it up to any more than it is, a brief and important medical procedure that will be over very, very quickly. Remembering how important the process of immunisation is to individual and public health is a good way of putting this in perspective, simply something everyone has got to go through.

• Move on quickly after a reward and some praise – congratulating your child and rewarding them are great ways of ensuring the experience is a positive one. Our brains register pain in a funny way and tend to put more weight on our feeling at the end of a procedure than during it. If you can replace pain with rewards and positivity, it’s more likely your child will have fonder memories of the event.

For some more tips on how we remember events like this check out this TED Talk.

Hawthorne Clinic’s experienced team will assist you in preparing your child as best possible for a stress-free vaccination. Experience working with children is a key part of our team’s background and they are always on hand to support you at vaccination time with words of comfort or a lollipop – whatever is necessary for the situation.