Children and War

The English Catholic weekly magazine The Tablet just published Trauma in a Time of Conflict, a review of the new book "Then They Started Shooting". The book looks at the effect of the Bosnian conflict upon the country's children. Among its observations:

One of the things that matters most to children is the attitudes of those around them. This conclusion, was, as the author points out, anticipated during the Blitz, when some children who lived through the bombings were found to be remarkably psychologically healthy, against all the odds, so long as their parents, neighbours and friends were positive and robust in adversity.

What mattered much more to the children in the Bosnian war, like those in the Blitz, was whether they were separated from their parents, and whether someone close to them had been killed or injured in the war. Such losses accompany war, but are not an inevitable consequence of it.

As the author puts it: “Children are not the passive recipients of experience. They are actively engaged in it, from an early age. They gather meanings from what is around them, first from their parents or caretakers and then from the world beyond – friends, school, community – as well as from their own previous experiences.”

Another sobering reality is that when it came to psychological disturbance, family conflict affected some children far worse than the war itself.