During our training workshop yesterday, our Ocelanie trainers spent quite a bit of time at the beginning of the day talking with us about young children’s common reactions to crisis situations. They pointed out that children generally have a much narrower perspective than adults, so “little things” that a more mature person can easily see beyond may seem like insurmountable catastrophes to children.  On the other hand, when a young child feels safe and secure (for example, feeling sheltered in the arms of a mother or father), they may not notice or even be aware of real dangers.  However, when parents show signs of anxiety and stress (as is the case for many refugee families), children instinctively sense their parents’ fear and unease, and become anxious and fearful themselves. So this is another context where, as one U.S. president once famously said, “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”

Depending on age, gender, personality, level of physical and emotional discomfort and myriad other factors, refugee children display a variety of complex responses to their plight, including overt signs of distress, anxiety and fear (for example, crying or tantrums, flinching and startling easily); regression to infancy (for example, thumb-sucking or bed-wetting by children who had already “outgrown” those habits); quasi-autistic symptoms (including for example social withdrawal, taciturnity, reticence); difficulty concentrating, learning and using short-term memory; aggression and violent impulses, including destructive behavior such as breaking toys; sleep and eating disorders; guilt and shame (particularly boys feeling bad because their fathers or elder brothers have stayed behind); engaging in risky and dangerous behavior; and premature sense of adult responsibility and consequentially higher stress.

We discussed how as volunteers we might respond if children want to play war, particularly with Russians as the enemy. An important training takeaway for us is that we should not be judgmental.  It’s not improbable that many Ukrainian children these days are hearing important adult role models in their lives talk about killing Russians.  So even the pacifists among us would be wise to “choose our battles” with caution, recognizing that there is a snowball’s chance in hell that we would be able to “re-educate” these children during the few short hours they are in our care.  We would better direct our efforts toward helping kids release their frustrations in as constructive a manner as possible.  For example, our trainers told us they were able to guide children to play at fighting zombies or vampires, instead of killing Russians. Perhaps their idea is to encourage children to release pent-up frustrations and self-defense instincts, while at the same time suggesting there may be worse bogeymen in this world than Russian invaders.  And maybe it’s those very bogymen who have possessed the Russians and impelled them to invade Ukraine.  That may be a constructive message to deliver, as long as it doesn’t plunge the children into a deeper sense of despair than they may already be suffering.

The main takeaway our trainers imparted on this topic is that children are incredibly resilient in the long run, so to the extent we are able to help them “forget” their current plight as refugees and give them some minutes of carefree joy, we have done constructive work.