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Home › Articles › Your Children › The Impact of War on Children

The Impact of War on Children

Soothing Kids in Tumultuous Times

By Jenn Director Knudsen

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Involve your child in volunteer activities, such as at a soup kitchen, to help them feel empowered.
Negotiate conflict.
Grace your family with calming rituals and unclog busy schedules.

Singler adds that pacifying kids on the spot is paramount. If a child awakens in the middle of the night from a nightmare, it's not OK to wait until morning to calm him down.

Tune out TV and Other Strategies
"The most important thing we can do right now ... is to take care of us, from the inside out," says Drew, a mother of two adult children, whose Web site, www.learningpeace.com, offers parents and teachers tips to create more peaceful lives for themselves and for children. "This is one of the most stressful times in recent history." So she recommends activities like prayer, yoga or tai chi to do as an individual or a family to help bring every member of the family closer together and to help them feel safe.

Sene, whose 7-year-old son broke down at the sight of people burning the American flag, has taken measures to help her children deal with the war in Iraq. Right after he witnessed that event, she sat down with her first-grade son to explain that people in this country have a right to peaceably demonstrate, though some go overboard and that's not all right. Sene now simply keeps the TV off and is careful to hide the sections of the newspaper with full-color photographs of the war's devastation.

Others are careful about what programs they tune into and when. Dorothy Bass, a 38-year-old mother of two, says though her 3-year-old, John, is completely unaware of the war, her 5-year-old, Capprin, hears bits and pieces of it in school. "[We] are more careful to watch shows, which are more talk-based than picture-based," says Bass, of Cambridge, Mass. "We watch The News Hour with Jim Lehrer

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