The Impact of War on Children

I am a Lebanese American person; I was only 3 years old when the Lebanese civil war started in Lebanon. The war left me with so many sad memories. I spent half of my childhood in a dark underground shelter; we used to share it with 4 other families. We had no electrical power most of the nights and days. It was unusual not to hear the bullets and the rockets sounds. Schools were closed most of the times. It was very depressing, destruction was everywhere, houses, buildings, schools, and even churches were burned and destructed by rockets and bombs. The most depressing day in my life was when I knew that my best friend got killed after her parents' house was bombed. I started crying and I started having scary nightmares during my sleep, I was always scared to lose any one from my family or any loved ones.

It was a very tough childhood, very unhealthy, and depressing. Now, I am very happy because my kids are not experiencing what I have experienced during my childhood. My heart is always with all the children in the world who have war in their countries like in Afghanistan, Iraq, Palestine, Africa, and in Lebanon too. War has lots of negative effects on children.

The Impact of the War on Iraqi Children,
A report by an international study team composed of nine experts, concludes that despite some improvements in the health and nutritional status of children from their post-1991 Gulf War state, Iraqi children are still in a significantly worse state than they were before the 1991 Gulf War. And because most of the 13 million Iraqi children are dependent on food distributed by the Government of Iraq, the disruption of this system by war would have a devastating impact on children who already have a high rate of malnutrition. A second key finding is that Iraqi children suffer significant psychological harm from the threat of war that is hanging over their head. War has particularly brutal effects on children. They are forced to develop within contexts of seemingly permanent psychosocial trauma or what some psychologists refer to as the "normal abnormality" of violence. Situations that once seemed unimaginable - the burning of one's home, the massacre of one's neighbors, the murder of one's parent or sibling - are occurring on a daily basis. A child constructs a sense of who he or she is and develops an identity within such violent contexts. Although individual children respond in quite distinct ways to loss and traumatic events a small number of relevant studies suggest that children in situations of institutionally-structured violence generally experience higher than usual levels of fear, anxiety, insecurity and aggressiveness. They frequently have difficulties in expressing themselves corporally and/or emotionally, often experience nightmares and exhibit both psychosomatic symptoms (for example, chronic head and stomach aches, allergies, tics) and regressive behaviors such as bedwetting. These symptoms may appear immediately after an experience of extreme violence or weeks, months, or even years later. Continuity in the presence of family members or a trusted adult have been found to be important supports for children coping with the effects of war.