If you've been frustrated in trying to get your kids vaccinated against H1N1 flu, you're not alone: Two thirds of parents who have sought vaccine for their children have failed to find it, according to a Harvard School of Public Health survey out today. That's no small deal, because 41 percent of the parents polled said they have tried to get their children vaccinated against swine flu. Hearing that big Wall Street firms Goldman Sachs and Citigroup got H1N1 vaccine doesn't do much to reassure worried parents that the system is directing vaccine to the kids who need it the most. Although almost 36 million doses of H1N1 vaccine have been distributed, many parents are still anxiously waiting.

My area is typical. At present there's no H1N1 vaccine to be found through the county health department, and school clinics have been canceled for lack of vaccine. I was able to get FluMist for my child at a county clinic in mid-October, even though she doesn't have asthma or other chronic health problems that would have put her at greater risk of complications. All children and young adults from 6 months old to 24 years are a priority group for H1N1 vaccine because they have little or no immunity to this flu virus. But in hindsight, I wish the county had been stricter with those first vaccine clinics and restricted them only to pregnant women and children who are at greater risk than mine.

Kids are stressed out, and their parents all too often don't know it. That's the word from the American Psychological Association's Stress in America survey, which for the first time asked children about their stress levels. One third of the 1,206 children ages 8 to 17 said they were more stressed now than a year ago. And parents seem to be missing those clues:

• Thirty percent of children said they worried about their family's financial problems, but only 18 percent of the parents thought this was a source of stress for the child.

• Almost half of children worried about doing well in school, while just one third of parents thought that was an issue for their child.

• Twenty-nine percent of teenagers said they worried about getting into a good college or getting a job after high school, while only 5 percent of teenagers' parents thought that was a source of stress.

• Two thirds of parents thought their own stress levels had no impact on their children, but 80 percent of the children said they learn healthy living habits from their parents.

There's no shortage of flu fear these days. We're either afraid our children will get the flu—and mad/scared/frustrated because there's no vaccine to be found—or afraid that the vaccine will cause grievous harm. Those last fears were stoked by the story of Desiree Jennings, a 26-year-old Washington Redskins cheerleader from Ashburn, Va., who fell ill 10 days after getting a seasonal flu shot. Antivaccine activist group Generation Rescue, founded by actors Jenny McCarthy and Jim Carrey, seized on her story, saying her apparent dystonia—manifesting itself in seizures and the inability to walk forward—was caused by the flu shot.

After the local Fox TV station here in D.C. reported Jennings's story, neurologists who saw the video (which is now a fixture on YouTube) said the symptoms didn't appear to be dystonia, a neurological disorder that causes sustained muscle spasms, but rather a psychogenic disorder, meaning the symptoms are real, but the cause is psychological. People with dystonia and the Dystonia Medical Research Foundation also spoke up; they were not happy to have their very real ailment pulled into the mix, especially since it has never been associated with the flu vaccine. Faced with the criticism, Generation Rescue pulled Jennings's story from its website.

Teenagers spend lots of time on MySpace, Facebook, and other social media sites talking about what they do. Often that talk is about underage drinking, risky sexual activity, and violence. But does it describe their actual activities, or is it just bragging?

About half of teenagers' social media posts refer to drinking, sex, or violence, according to Megan Moreno, an assistant professor of pediatrics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. That discovery, which was reported earlier this year, left Moreno wondering if all that chatter was reality or trash talk. She's still working on answering that question, but she has found out this: Kids do think that what they see on social media sites is real, and the younger they are, the more they believe it. That's important, because teenagers are powerfully influenced by the behavior of their peers.

Is my child getting enough vitamin D to stay healthy this winter? That was my question in the early morning gloom as I scanned the label of our Dora the Explorer multivitamins. The 400 IU listed meets the recommended daily value for children. But that may not be enough, according to new research from Children's Hospital Boston. How could that be? I quickly called Jonathan Mansbach, a pediatrician and coauthor of the study, to get the scoop.

About one third of the children in his study, which looked at blood levels of vitamin D in about 5,000 children, were taking multivitamins. Most of those multis, like my family's, contained 400 IU of D. But of the children taking multivitamins, 62 percent had blood levels of vitamin D below 75 nmol/L, a level increasingly thought to be a better reflection of the amount of the nutrient needed to prevent disease than the 50 nmol/L recommended by the American Academy of Pediatricians. (Ten percent of the kids taking vitamins had a D level below the AAP's recommended level.) "The conclusion there is that 400 [IU] may not be enough," says Mansbach. Good to know, but what should I do? The doctor's next sentence was not what a mother wants to hear. "What is the correct amount is kind of hard to say."

I no longer need to wonder what it will be like when H1N1 swine flu hits my town. About 10 percent of the kids at our neighborhood elementary school are home sick, and a friend just E-mailed me that her 5-year-old is home, terribly sick with swine flu. This was not a mild illness. The poor girl ran a fever of 105.5, and the fever didn't respond to medication. She's better today, thank goodness. But I share this to make the point that H1N1 can cause serious illness in healthy kids. And the number of children falling sick has risen steeply in the past few weeks. So has the number who end up in the hospital.

No child should have to suffer unnecessarily. I know this girl's mom tried hard to get an H1N1 vaccine for her daughter, but supplies are scarce around Washington, where we live. So that girl suffered, while my daughter, who got vaccinated for H1N1 last week, should be fairly well protected by now, even though she hasn't had the recommended second dose.

Kids aren’t the only critters getting sick with swine flu; a ferret has come down with it, too. The pet's owners took their ferret to a vet in Portland, Ore., on October 5, and the ferret’s nose mucus tested positive for genetic markers for H1N1 flu. Scientists have known for a long time that ferrets can get human flu; in fact, they use ferrets in the laboratory to test flu treatments. But ferrets are also popular pets. In this case, first reported in the Oregonian, it sounds like the ferret got the flu from its owner. And it appears to be the first reported case of H1N1 flu traveling from people to animals.

That’s not all the animal flu news today. A pig at the Minnesota State Fair also tested positive for H1N1. Human and pig influenza viruses are very similar and can infect both species, but there’s no indication that the state-fair pig has infected any humans. (Here’s the federal Department of Agriculture's press release on the swine with swine flu.)

I was the first one on my block to get my child vaccinated against H1N1 swine flu, but it took a three-hour wait in the cold, standing outside a county health clinic with 1,400 other flu-shot seekers. I learned firsthand that getting healthcare during a pandemic can be confusing and difficult. If we're lucky, the glitches will get ironed out as more vaccine becomes available and public health departments streamline operations. But for now, getting an H1N1 shot is an adventure.

I decided to take my daughter for an H1N1 vaccine this week after calling the county health department. The woman there told me the department had 14,000 doses of injectable vaccine on hand, and just a few hundred people had shown up for the vaccine clinic last week. Sounded like a breeze. But clearly I wasn't the only one who got the word. When I showed up at 9:45 on Wednesday with a friend and our two 6-year-olds, the line of shot-seekers wrapped around the building, past some dumpsters, and out to the street. News helicopters clattered overhead, and county police directed traffic. (Here's a local TV news report showing the long line of people waiting for H1N1 flu shots in Silver Spring, Md.) The people near the front of the line had already been waiting an hour, but we moms decided to stay, figuring we'd blown the morning and would only have to wait again if we came back another day.

It's decision time on getting children vaccinated against H1N1. I have been playing the waiting game—checking the pediatrician's office, checking the school website—and finding no information on when the vaccine might arrive. Just this morning, another mom and I compared notes over coffee, wondering when the vaccine would show up and debating what we would do when it did. But when I called the county health department flu hotline this afternoon, I hit pay dirt. "We just got 14,000 injectables," the woman answering the phone told me. And there's a free vaccine clinic tomorrow. "Just don't come early," she said. "Everyone comes early, and there's a line."

So do I take my 6-year-old for an H1N1 flu shot tomorrow, or wait a bit in the hope that my pediatrician will get some, saving me the cross-county schlep and the wait in line? "Any day now" was the answer I got from the pediatrician's receptionist this morning when I asked when they might be getting H1N1 vaccine. No matter what route we choose, my husband and I have decided that our daughter should get immunized.

This week my daughter, a friend of hers, and I walked the mile plus to her elementary school, picking up the first red maple leaves of fall along the way. It was a glorious way to start the day, far better than the usual rush to the bus stop. And since it's National Walk to School Month, I figured, why not?

But few kids, including mine, walk to school anymore. Lenore Skenazy wants to change that. She's the author of the new book Free-Range Kids (Jossey-Bass, $24.95), and you may remember her as the mom who caught a heap of heat for letting her 9-year-old son ride the New York subway by himself. There was more kerfuffle last month, when she was quoted in a New York Times article on how walking to school has become a political act.

On our morning walk to school in suburban Washington, we saw kids at the bus stop and kids in cars, but only one other kid out and about—another first grader, riding bikes to school with his dad. Where are all the kids?

So I called Lenore last night, just as her two boys, now 11 and 13, were getting home from Boy Scouts—to which they had traveled by city bus. If we don't let kids set out and explore the world on their own, Skenazy argues, they'll be fat, scared, and depressed. Here's an edited version of our talk:

One in 100 American children has autism, higher than previously thought, according to a new federal survey of parents, reported in this week's Pediatrics. But parents of young children don't need to see those numbers to know how terrifying the threat of the disorder can be. We don't know what causes it, and there's no good treatment. All the more reason we need to figure out now what's causing autism and then develop treatments that really work. No one cares more than a parent about that; so why not involve them in that process?

That's just what the Interactive Autism Network is doing. Parents of children with autism from around the country collaborate in building what has become the largest online autism registry in the world. The IAN registry was launched by Baltimore's Kennedy Krieger Institute in 2007. By making use of the power of the Internet, it has registered 30,000 people from all 50 states. The database created by this volunteer effort is being used by autism researchers around the world and is also used to match families with individual studies they can join.