Many of us struggle with a fear of needles, even when we’re grown up. Then, it’s easy to understand why your kids start crying or wiggling when getting vaccinated. They are scared of needles.
They’re sinister, sharp and they sting. Unless you’re a hard-as-nails child, who wouldn’t be scared of them? So, what can you do to help your kids overcome or neglect of that pain? Stay beside and comfort them? Do something to divert their attention? All sound great.
This New Orleans dad tries his best to make his daughter feel at ease during needle procedure prove they ‘ain’t nothing’. How? He pretends to get vaccinated, too.
In a video from July last year, a young little girl is wary of the needle, so her father leaps into action.
Courtney Smith had taken his four-year-old daughter Codi J to the Daughters of Charity Center in New Orleans, Louisiana, to get vaccinated. In the morning before getting out of the door, Codi was rather nervous about getting the two shots, so the dad thought of the ideal way to make her more relaxed.
Courtney let his daughter sit on his lap while the attending nurse wipes his arm first. ‘This ain’t nothing,’ he assures his daughter, as he pretends to receive the injection and the nurse happily plays along. He lets out a high-pitched ‘ooh’, which clearly puts Codi J at ease.
See the clip here.
In the video, originally posted to Reddit by u/natsdorf, the nurse then tells the young girl: ‘One in for dad, ready? Your turn, ready?’ Like her dad, she lets out the same noise, before he says: ‘Man that thing hurt a little bit, huh?’
They repeat the process for the second injection, without a single hiccup. Not just that, Courtney does more to help his daughter. He actually has his blood taken before Codi J. At the end of the clip, Courtney and his little daughter flex their muscles, having conquered the vaccinations.
When the clip was shared on the Internet, it received hundreds of praise for the dad, with one user writing: ‘It’s little stuff like this that remind me that most people are generally good, caring. The internet and mass media are always telling me otherwise.’
Another user commented: ‘By doing this he is demonstrating to his daughter that it is important to sometimes do scary/painful/difficult things and that he and her were in it together. Not only effective in the short term, but a hella teaching strategy that has a great long-term lesson. He dadded the shit out of vaccine day in this video!’
A third wrote: ‘This is such a great way to approach vaccinations (or any other similar thing): they acknowledge that it hurts a bit, don’t try to hide the discomfort but don’t overplay it either, and support the girl in believing she can handle it.’