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Over the past ten days, whenever Mushtaq Ahmed heard drones or helicopters nearing his home in Kashmir, around 100 km from the border with Pakistan, he immediately checked whether his children were watching cartoons on television.
If they were not, he turned on the device. If they were already in front of it, he ensured that cartoons were playing and turned the volume up as high as possible so that they would not hear the machines. Sometimes he made them put on headphones and played the cartoon Doraemon for them on mobile phones.
Ahmed’s children are seven and 14 years old. When India and Pakistan began to attack each other on May 7, they grew anxious for their safety and would sometimes go into a panic. “They were so anxious that they began to throw up,” Ahmed said. “When they heard the helicopters and drones, they got very scared, so I tried to drown out the noise.”
But Ahmed also ensured that the television was not playing a news channel, many of which broadcast shrill misinformation aimed at stoking fear and anger. “Whatever they were showing on TV was very scary,” he said.
The family tries to avoid discussing anything about the conflict inside the house. However, they realised it was impossible to avoid conversations on the subject. During one particularly tense day, Ahmed recounted, “my son asked me what had happened and I just told him that there was nothing to worry”.
He added, “We are in the middle of a conflict zone, so we are kind of used to it but how do we explain it to our children? They ask me if they are going to die or if they will be killed, but I tell them that nothing of that sort will happen.”
Drones, shelling
As tensions between India and Pakistan escalated sharply after Operation Sindoor across India’s northern and western frontier, parents like Ahmed struggled to explain the unfolding events to their terrified children and to try and reassure them that they were safe – even if they themselves were far from certain of it.
The conflict represented the first time in recent decades that civilian populations in Indian towns and cities in the region had come under threat from Pakistani military action – attempted attacks reached as far into the Indian heartland as Sirsa in Haryana, around 260 km from New Delhi, where a Pakistani missile was shot down and crashed in a field.
While adults may have had some understanding of the conflict, for children, the sounds of explosions around them and the sight of drones hovering in the air represented an incomprehensible encounter with the terrors of war.
Adding to this, as some experts noted, in the current times, children’s confusion and fear is heightened by the almost uncontrollable barrage of misinformation that they encounter daily. Abby Paathak, an educator, addressed this in an ebook that he wrote when the conflict first started, to help parents talk to children about military conflicts.
Paathak wrote that children hear “snippets on TV news, catch fragments of adult conversation, scroll past inflammatory social media posts and piece together narratives that often lack crucial context”.
In the city of Jammu, Shreya Kudal’s 14-year-old nephew refused to eat when the fighting first broke out. The Class 7 student was petrified that he and his family were going to be killed. “We are only 15 km from the border,” Kudal said. “There was a lot of shelling where we stayed and this scared not just the children in our house but all the children on the street.”
She recounted the child’s reaction the first time a blackout was imposed in their area. “We did not know about it and someone knocked on our door and asked us to turn off the lights,” she recounted. “My nephew became scared and started crying.
Kudal ook him to the terrace and showed him that nothing was happening. “Then we spent the rest of the night discussing what the conflict was about,” she said.
Kudal said she did her best to offer the child an explanation that would not stoke anger or fear in him. “I told him that he should not hate any country or its people because there were little children like him everywhere,” she said.
Like Ahmed, Kudal also made sure that her nephew did not watch news channels, and the television was largely tuned in to cartoons.
In the neighbouring state of Punjab, Heera Singh’s two toddlers, who are around two and four, were too young to grasp the significance of the loud sounds outside their home in Mehdipur, which is just around 2 km from the border with Pakistan. But Singh worried that the drones would wake the children in the middle of the night.
His older son had some questions about the situation. “He asks if something happens to our house then where we would go?” the father said. “But I told him not to worry because I don’t want to cause him any unnecessary stress.”
Further from the border
Even parents further away from the border found themselves struggling to protect their children from the stress that came from the tide of news about the fighting. Vrinda Maheshwari, who lives in Delhi, recounted that she sought to limit her children’s exposure to news, but that they came across other information at their school.
“Initially I didn’t want to tell them about Pahalgam, but later I told them that whatever conflict was happening was very far from us and so they did not have to worry about it, “ she said.
Maheshwari too does not watch the news in the house. “We have not watched news at home for a while now, since it has just turned into people shouting at each other without any sort of reliability,” she said. “This incident just highlighted this for us, as all we saw was bizarre scaremongering and no real information either.”
One day, however, her six-year-old happened to enter his grandparents’ room while a news channel was playing. She recounted that the child soon came running out of the room in panic. “He completely freaked out and was terrified that something would happen to us,” Maheshwari said. “I told him the missiles would not reach Delhi. But he was still very scared and did not leave my side, we had to reassure him repeatedly until he calmed down.”
She added, “I told him that not everything he sees on the news is real and now that he can read, he can read the newspapers and learn about it himself.”
Maheshwari’s children were also worried about family members in Jammu. “They asked me how our relatives in Jammu will escape if missiles hit Jammu,” she said.
Samyukta PC, a resident of Chennai, shared with Scroll a recorded a conversation she had with her nine-year-old daughter Yazhini about the conflict. Towards the end of the 25-minute conversation, the girl broke down in tears, worried for the safety of her family and friends.
“India and Pakistan are like brothers, I just want the two countries to talk it out and stop the war, I just want them to stop,” Yazhini said tearfully. “I don’t care if anything happens to me, I just want my family to be safe.”
Samyukta comforted Yazhini, assuring her that the family would be safe. “See, we have lived through two floods, one pandemic, so your family is going to work 100 times over to keep you safe,” Samyukta said.
Calming children proved a challenge to parents because all over the country, many gathered half-formed facts about the war from young friends.
Siri, a nine-year-old from Bengaluru, Karnataka, recounted that she had heard from her friends that “Pakistan was planting bombs and if somebody walked on them, it would blast”. Her mother, Ramya K, explained that the extent of fear her daughter experienced was limited because her school was not in session at the time, and thus she was not regularly interacting with other children. “I’m a little scared but not that scared,” Siri said. “But many people are dying and that is very sad.”
Professional advice and guides like Paathak’s proved useful to many parents who sought to give their children some understanding of the situation.
Paathak, who lives in Delhi, told Scroll that he was motivated to write the ebook after encountering two children play-acting as the recent conflict was playing out. The children were pretending that they were in a warzone – the enemy they had chosen was a man who had a tailoring and ironing shop on the road.
“The man was visibly Muslim and these children were acting like they had guns, they were pretending to hide, drawing lines around his shop,” Paathak said. “The man looked uncomfortable but he continued to smile at the children”
He added, “The children had seemed to have overheard fragmented pieces of conversation between adults or seen things on the news, which had led them to behave that way.”
Paathak’s suggestions in the ebook included that parents use simple language to explain the conflict, strive to present balanced arguments, avoid inculcating judgemental attitudes towards other countries and acknowledge and accept the children’s emotions.
“Without thoughtful guidance, these children risk adopting polarised viewpoints that perpetuate cycles of misunderstanding,” Paathak wrote in the ebook, which he posted on social media, and a PDF of which many parents circulated among each other.
Though fighting has stopped, many parents, especially those close to the border, remain haunted by the memories of the conflict, and of the effects it had on their children. In Kashmir, Ahmed recounted that his children’s faces would turn pale every time a mock drill was announced or a siren sounded. “I could just see the colour drain from their faces,” he said.
Ahmed still worries about what his children will do when he is at work. “I think the schools should do counselling sessions to provide students with some kind of support, especially because we live in a conflict zone,” he said. “I worry that they won’t know what to do in case there is some kind of attack when I’m at work.”
This article first appeared on Scroll.in
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