Every Child Deserves A Peaceful Childhood – OpEd |
(UCA News) — There is a sound that belongs to childhood. You never think to notice it until it has gone — laughter spilling out of a schoolyard, the slap of a jump rope on a warm sidewalk, a parent’s voice through a lit doorway at dusk. Small sounds. Ordinary sounds. The kind that tell a child, without words, that the world is holding steady and there is still time to play before dark.
War does not gradually take that away. It takes it all at once, on a specific night, and nothing quite goes back to the way it was before.
I have thought about this a lot. Not because I have easy answers — I do not — but because the question keeps pulling at me. How do we live in a world where some children fall asleep to cricket sounds and bedroom fans, while others press their hands over their ears and wait for the walls to stop shaking? How do we hold both of those realities in our heads at the same time and not feel the weight of that distance?
When a child grows up with conflict, something shifts in them that does not easily shift back. Not just emotionally — physically, neurologically, in ways science is still catching up to fully explain. It isn’t only buildings that war destroys. It is the invisible architecture of childhood.
The quiet assumption that the ground beneath your feet is solid. The unspoken belief that the adults around you are in control of something. War takes those beliefs and replaces them with a fear so persistent it eventually starts to feel like normal. And that might be the saddest part of all — when terror becomes the baseline, when a child stops........