The children don’t miss a beat of their song and dance routine as air raid sirens blare and the mobile phones of the adults in the room warn of an incoming ballistic missile.
“They do absorb the anxiety of all the adults around them,” says Liudmyla Vozniuk, a child psychologist working with children in Dnipro. “The fact that their parents are waking them up and taking them into the corridor , even coming to these classes, it all affects their emotional state,” she says. “Wetting the bed and bad dreams have become frequent. They are no longer trusting, either.”
Anna says her children have had to become her focus, but when Sergiy went to school this year she knew her youngest son needed help. Finding this centre was like a “reply from the universe”, she says. It has provided a safe and caring place both for her and Dima.Credit:“The children work it out even if you don’t speak to them about the war directly,” she says. “Things are no longer the same, but he likes it here very much … and the process of socialisation has helped him.
“My grandson, when he hears the sirens he does not cope well,” he says. “He doesn’t sleep at night either – he has become very nervous. And that has affected the adults; it has caused huge stress on us all.” World Vision CEO Daniel Wordsworth with a young mother and her son in a shelter on the outskirts of Kyiv.“Adults respond to the event and children respond to how the adults respond to the event,” he says. “A children-friendly space is a much more powerful thing than a person imagines. Having a group of mothers in a room next to a group of children is fantastic for them. They love it, they need it.
She says that while much of the international focus has rightly been on the brave efforts of Ukrainian armed forces, more than 30,000 of whom have been killed, more attention must be paid to the women and children living in stressful war conditions.Credit:Her organisation had already begun providing humanitarian aid while Irpin was still occupied, delivering it to the least accessible areas of the Kyiv region.