There are over 1.5 billion people experience armed conflict. Children are the most innocent and vulnerable victims, but not just from the obvious physical dangers, but from the often unspoken effects that wars have on their families. The experiences of war leave children at a real high risk for the development of emotional and behavioural problems. Good news is children can be protected by warm, secure parenting during and after conflict. 

The speaker is originally from Syria, and she lost several family members in really horrifying ways. She has two kids who are at an age typically asked lots and lots questions. She began to wonder what it might be like to parent her children in a war zone and a refugee camp. How she could cope?

She is psychologists and parent trainers, they know that arming parents with skills in caring for their children can have a huge effect on their well-being, and they call this parent training. She wonder if parent training programs be useful for families while they were still in war zones or refugee camps?

For the past 5 years, she and her colleagues have been working on ways to support families that have experienced war and displacement. 

1) The first step must be to ask them what they’re struggling with, right? She travelled to refugee camps in Syria and in Turkey. She listened their parenting challenges, listened to their parenting struggles and listened to their call for help. They told her about their struggles, they told her about rough, harsh refugee camp conditions that made it hard to focus on anything but practical chores like collecting clean water. They told her how they watched their children withdraw: the sadness, depression, anger, bed-wetting, thumb sucking, fear of loud noises, fear of nightmares - terrifying, terrifying nightmares. They watched their children change and they had no idea how to help them. 

At same time, they ale found that these families were so motivated to support their children. They were making attempts at seeking support from different organisations, but very difficult or useless. 

2) After hours of speaking to NGO workers, a fantastic innovative idea  of distributing parenting information leaflets via bread wrappers that were being delivered to families in a conflict zone in Syria by humanitarian workers. There were two pieces of paper brought with bread wrappers. One was parenting information leaflet that had basic advice and information that normalised to the parent what they might be experiencing, and what their child might be experiencing. The other piece of paper was a feedback questionnaire. 

In one week, they managed to distribute 3000, and a 60% response rate. The families had left hundreds of messages - most incredibly positive and encouraging. 

But the most important is that the wars needed to stop. We need to build a world where children can dream of planes dropping gifts, and not bombs.