The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced last week that people vaccinated against COVID-19 no longer need to wear masks indoors. Plenty has been written about whether this decision was well communicated, whether it was too hasty, and whether it could possibly have the intended effect of swaying anyone toward vaccines. But if you’re a parent like me, already exhausted from a year of trying to take care of a small person during a global crisis, you likely have one overarching question: What am I supposed to do now? Advertisement So many parents are now responsible for shepherding their unvaccinated kids through a semi-vaxxed-and-unmasked world. Vaccines protecting against COVID-19 aren’t yet available for kids under 12, and kids ages 12 to 15 just became eligible for the Pfizer vaccine on May 10. So unless your kid is in a vaccine clinical trial—and you’re confident they didn’t get a placebo—all parents of kids ages 12 and under are in the sticky situation of figuring out how to handle unvaccinated family members. The CDC gives basically no guidance on how parents can trust that the unmasked people around them are vaccinated, or how risky it is to take a little one to the store when mask mandates are down and case rates are up. “It seems like kids are just getting overlooked in this,” says Tara Smith, an infectious disease epidemiologist at Kent State University in Ohio and parent of a 7-year-old. To navigate this new morass of risk calculations, I spoke to Smith and Monica Gandhi, an infectious disease doctor at the University of California, San Francisco. They had somewhat different outlooks—illustrating just how much work is being thrust on parents right now to make constant judgment calls.