Parents who confidently reject vaccines and other forms of medical intervention often seek out pediatric care, medical treatments, and prescription medications for their children in ways that seem to contradict these views. Drawing on in-depth interviews with 34 parents who rejected some or all vaccines for their children, this article examines the strategies they use to pharmaceutically manage their children’s health, even when espousing a larger rejection of pharmaceutical interventions like childhood vaccines. Rather than treating decision-making as solely an internal process, this article shows how medication use results from individual, interactional, and institutional contexts, with different mechanisms of encouragement and enforcement. Using three illustrative cases, I show how parents manage ambivalence, which allows them to accept medication for their children as a tool to be deployed as deemed necessary in particular contexts while at the same time communicating their rejection of it. I conclude with suggestions for how to engage parents around healthcare decision-making.

中文翻译：

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疫苗拒绝与药物默许：家长控制与儿童健康管理中的矛盾心理

自信地拒绝疫苗和其他形式的医疗干预的父母通常会以似乎与这些观点相矛盾的方式为他们的孩子寻求儿科护理、医疗和处方药。本文通过对 34 位拒绝为孩子接种部分或全部疫苗的父母进行的深入采访，研究了他们用于控制孩子健康的药物策略，即使他们支持更广泛地拒绝儿童疫苗等药物干预措施。本文并没有将决策仅视为一个内部过程，而是展示了药物使用如何从个人、互动和制度环境中产生，并具有不同的鼓励和强制机制。我使用三个说明性案例，展示了父母如何管理矛盾心理，这使他们能够为孩子接受药物作为一种工具，可以在特定情况下根据需要进行部署，同时表达他们对药物的拒绝。最后，我提出了有关如何让父母参与医疗保健决策的建议。