If the television programs, articles, and word-of-mouth are to be trusted, the act of parenting has become an absolute cultural conflict. Apparently, some parents are opposed to immunizations nowadays – some of them believe that any infectious diseases can be cured by antibiotics, while some concern about the safety and amount of vaccines must be received by children ranging from age 0 to age 6 (Marotz, 2011). The vaccine debate among parents who vaccinate their children and parents who do not, has begun since 80 years ago and it continues to this day. In order to decide to vaccinate children or not, however, it is important to get the parents educated about what vaccines are and how they work. Inarguably, vaccines are basically one of the most important breakthroughs in history that are widely used as health intervention that prevent people from infectious diseases (Chen & Hibbs, 1998). They capitalize the natural abilities of our bodies’ immune system by triggering lymphocytes, a type of white blood cell to produce antibodies against the pathogens, which in this case are inactivated viruses, introduced by vaccine (PRESS, 2011 & The College of Physicians of Philadelphia, 2014). Over the decades, we have benefited so much from vaccines, including the eradication of smallpox and near eradication of polio (NIAID, 2008). Yet, parents’ forbearance of adverse events caused by vaccines is considerably low; therefore as a teacher, it is important to get them know about the benefits of getting children vaccinated.
As a teacher, I would advise the parents to vaccinate their children as it is an important step to ensure children’s health and get them protected from preventable diseases. Besides that, I would let parents to know the risk of their children in getting diseases from others or even spread the diseases to others if they are not vaccinated; which would lead to lasting complications or even death to both sides (IAC, n.d.). Also, vaccines can decrease...