How Do You Decide if Children Can Play Together Again?

As some parts of the country “open up” and families venture beyond their households, parents are faced with hard decisions about what children can do. There are no official guidelines, so I asked smart and experienced pediatricians from around the country what questions they are getting from parents, and how they’re answering them. Spoiler alert: There are no easy answers.

“I’m getting it every day in my office: what do we do, we can’t stay home forever, we need some activities,” said Dr. Sally Goza, the president of the American Academy of Pediatrics, who is a primary care private practice pediatrician in Fayetteville, Ga. “I try to explain to parents, this virus is not gone, it’s still here, we need to be smart in how we go about being around other people.”

Despite the “novelty” of the virus, these dilemmas are not entirely new — this is what parents do: weigh risks, look at what the experts say, figure out where your own level of comfort is, and then make decisions that affect the health and safety of the people you love best.

Making these decisions is going to involve choosing other families you feel you can trust. “There’s a certain amount of selecting out families with the same level of risk aversion,” said Dr. David Rubin, director of PolicyLab at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia...

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/01/well/family/coronavirus-reopening-children-parents-play-dates.html