Learner Dad: I get the impulse to keep our kids in the dark about war in Ukraine

Picture: iStock 

What do you say to kids about war? We haven’t said that much to ours about the invasion of Ukraine, because they have enough things to be thinking about without adding World War III.

You can see how Russian kids in Irish schools might be exposed at the moment. The air is thick with anti-Russian sentiment, and as much as you might tell your own kids that this is just aimed at Putin and his gang, it’s naive to think that some of this wouldn’t land on ordinary Russians.

I can’t remember much about my primary school days at this stage, but we weren’t exactly nuanced when it came to picking on someone. So I’d rather not say much about the war, in case my kids get a thing against Russians. It’s never a good idea to make your kids think there is something wrong with one race or another. I had weird notions about Germans after reading too many Warlord magazines – it was an eye-opener to go and live there for a year in the mid-90s.

Anyway, there isn’t much chat about the war in our house. That’s probably because our two kids never get to see or hear the news.

We all watched the news at 6 o’clock when I was growing up in the 1970s because there wasn’t anything else to do. The car radio was left on during the news, so we heard about all sorts of atrocities, in Ireland and overseas. I’m not sure if it did us any harm.

I want to be as open as possible with my kids. That’s mainly because I can’t keep a secret – a friend of mine still refers to me as the human sieve. But I also think most things are better out than in.

And still, I get the impulse to keep our kids in the dark about war in the east. The BBC’s Ukrainian editor who decided to flee Kyiv because her 10-year-old-son was shaking with fear – I think that hit a nerve with parents all over the world. The more recent story of the six-year-old girl who was reported to have died, dehydrated and alone, in the ruins of her home in Mariupol, will never leave me. There are kids like mine dying in Ukraine every day in harrowing circumstances.

And still, we make lunches for our two every day and they skip off out to school. This is the way I want it to stay.

Sometimes, I don’t know what to think.

I have a sneaky little look forward to our holidays in June and feel guilty for wondering if we’ll still be able to go. I curse this war coming just as Covid was supposed to be over and then I think how lucky we are, with all of Europe between us and the super-humans bringing the fight to Putin in Ukraine.

I’m back doom-scrolling the internet, like the dark days of Covid, looking for any bit of good news in the middle of all the gloom. But just because they call it doom-scrolling doesn’t make it untrue. The country with the largest nuclear arsenal in the world is at war with nearly everyone.

I’ll do the worrying for my kids, just like my parents probably did for me. (Even if they did let me listen to the news.) The world came close to nuclear war in the early 1980s when the Soviet Union’s leaders thought they were about to be attacked by the west. Nothing happened in the end. Here’s hoping that this plays out the same way. And the kids in Ukraine can stop shaking with fear.