My kids are fed up with me flicking between CNN, Good Morning Britain and Sky News every morning as they prepare for school.
In the car on the school run we listen to LBC. Some days BBC Five Live. In our house mine might be the first marriage in trouble over an ever-growing mountain of newspapers I never quite seem to get through.
I’m a news junkie. My family is from a culture well versed in displacement. Now we are talking our kids through the crisis in Ukraine.
We first discussed whether – and how – to talk about it last week as the Russian tanks rolled in and the bombs started to fall.
My daughters – who read last week’s column on the racism still preventing black and brown people from fleeing the bloodshed while others receive smooth passage – want to be kept informed.
My sons came home from school to reveal the conversation that day had been dominated by the death of a 10-year-old Ukrainian schoolgirl – pink-haired Polina – shot dead by Russian forces as she tried to flee Kyiv.
Over the weekend we discussed the story of eight-year-old Zlata, raised by her grandma in a western Ukrainian village with her mum working over here.
Zlata spent one night last weekend in darkness, hiding under a bed listening to gunfire and warplanes.
Speaking via video call she told her mother: “If I never see you again, and I die, know that I love you very much.”
Her mum instantly raised the cash for a flight and was, thank God, reunited with her daughter.
We talked about what the kids would do in a similar situation as we discussed ways to help beyond donating clothes and shoes.
We’ve tried to correct misinformation and allay the concerns of our teenagers who have noticed the escalation of the rhetoric coming out of Russia. Their grandparents and some of their friends know all about forced migration.
I tend not to get too much into the Ukraine death toll with my ten-year-old daughter. But if eight-year-olds like Zlata, are having to hide or run from bombs, in the right context, my ten-year-old should at least be told about it too.
In any case, before all this happened we helped our children to make sense of the chaos around Trump, George Floyd and the resulting recent impact on our world. We’ve talked about other conflicts and injustices and they know all about Black oppression pre and post-Windrush. We can do this.
We need to do this.
Having already been to Amsterdam and visited the home of Anne Frank, we discussed the poignancy of some parents in Ukraine sewing badges with their child’s blood group on to their clothes and teaching them their home address and parents’ names, in case they are separated.
For us, it is important to teach our kids about it all so that they are not caught up in the culture wars that skew reality, omit facts and blur the truth.
We could easily have left it to school but it is not their responsibility to teach our kids about the harsh realities and evil in the world awaiting them. It is ours.
