tl;dr – My wife continually expresses concerns over our children’s vaccination schedules and I struggle with the lack of logic behind it. How do I figure out what’s driving her fears?
Before anyone wonders – yes, she is getting our kids the vaccines she says she does.
I have addressed her concerns over and over with data and logical reasoning, but then a few months later it’s like we never had that discussion and I might as well have just waved her off rather than combing through metastudies and explaining their implications. I’ve come to realize that her worries are too vague for me to address with specifics. She took our 2nd kid for his first major round of immunizations and came back without having gotten any because she wanted to discuss if they’re all really necessary. I asked her if her concern was the fact that there are multiple vaccines with potential adverse events grouped together. She said yes. I asked if it would assuage her worries if the pediatrician spaced out the injections so that any potential adverse events didn’t overlap. She said that would help. I asked her what else she was worried about. She said she didn’t know if it was good to be getting that many vaccines in total. I asked if she could be more specific about her concerns. She couldn’t.
I’m about to sit her down and calmly ask her to state her specific concerns, see if they’re founded in any evidence whatsoever, and then discuss how we can allay those concerns. Then I’m going to say that I’d feel like an idiot if our son got polio because Candace Owens said such-and-such on her podcast.
Beyond that, I don’t know what to do. Like I said, facts and logic aren’t going to work because these worries obviously aren’t built on those. I can throw numbers at her all day but it doesn’t do a thing. How do I figure out what’s driving this and address it with her? Step one is probably getting her off The Daily Wire and similar podcasts, which I’m working on. I need someone with some internet-empathy for a stranger’s wife who can help him understand her and help her.
Comments
Youre right in that you’ll need to pull her out of the right-wing podcast community. Aside from that, you probably need some type of therapist. De-culting a person is way above Reddits pay grade. And thats essentially what this is- like you say, its not logic; shes been swept up in a movement.
Technically vaccines are linked to increased rates of autism diagnoses. This is due to the fact that in order to be diagnosed with autism you need to be alive.