~ Are You Anti-War? Are Your Children? ~

Today, only one percent of the news we see on television or read about in our newspapers covers the wars that are raging around the world. As a result, in the United States, we have a generation of children who rarely have their lives touched by the negative consequences of war.

So, isn’t that good? Children shouldn’t be exposed to war, right?

Wrong

While children should never have to be in a war, to fail to teach them about the cruelty of warfare and its horrific consequences means that they will be less prepared to make decisions about the wars waged in the future and will be less likely to be empathetic to the innocent victims of war.

So, where do we start?

With great anti-war books.

Below is a list of books that show war as the ugly, wounding morally wrong way to solve problems that it is or that show how hope is an essential defense against the futility that anti-war activism often represents.

A Child’s Garden: A Story of Hope by Michael Foreman

Like all great picture books, this one is an allegory that can be read on many levels. Superficially, it is about a child who finds a lone plant growing in a war-torn ruin and shows how he nurses it until it covers the barbed wire fence separating him from the other side. For young readers, we can emphasize the message of hope with the vision that one day war ends, and there can be peace. But only if we work at it.

With older students and adults, we can apply the lesson to all the refugee camps that dot our planet and use a discussion of the story to speak to the inhumanity of war and hate. This is a book to accompany the study of the Holocaust, Japanese internment camps, the Trail of Tears, Syrian refugees, and more. Only by cherishing that tender shoot of hope and taking action, will we have the power to demand an end to war and to the hate that imprisons people.

Recommended for lower and upper elementary.

The General by Janet Charters

When a general falls off his horse, he discovers that nature is beautiful and regrets how war destroys it. Taking action, he set about restoring the world to peace and beauty.

Recommended for lower and upper elementary school

Good Night, Commander by Ahmad Akbarpour

Having lost his leg and his mother, a young Iraq boy is consumed with revenge. He spends his time alone in his room plotting what he will do to his enemy in the drawings he makes. But when he discovers that the enemy is also missing a leg, he realizes that war and revenge are not going to solve their problems, only empathy will. Beautiful illustrated with children’s drawings.

Upper Elementary and Middle School

The Enemy: A Book About Peace by Davide Cali & Serge Bloch

In this allegorical anti-war book, a soldier sits in a fox hole and imagines his enemy as a beast and a monster. But when he finally sees the other soldier, he realizes he is a man just like him. This is powerful book for children and adults and will serve as great discussion starter about who is an enemy – the hateful beast depicted by warmongers or a human being just like you.

Recommended for upper elementary to adult

Playing War by Kathy Beckwith

Is war a game? It is for Luke and his friends. But when they meet Sameer and learn from him what war is really like, war games no longer seem like fun.

Recommended for lower and upper elementary

Sami and the Time of the Troubles by Florence Perry Heide

This relatively dark, painful story sheds light on what it is to live through a war. Although it is set in Beirut, Lebanon, the location matters less than the graphic images of people struggling to live in a time of war, as they hide from the bombs, and remain hopeful. A good book to start a discussion on the negative impacts of war.

Recommended for upper elementary and middle school

The Sky of Afghanistan by Ana A. de Eulate

A young girl in war-torn Afghanistan dreams of peace. A peace kite representing her country flies from picture to picture bringing her message of peace into the hearts of families and people everywhere.

This is a story told mainly through pictures and symbols. For young children, adult readers can emphasis the need for everyone to live in a peaceful world. Challenge older readers to make their own peace kite and to emblazon them with their own message of peace. Follow up by learning more about Afghanistan and the war going on there.

Recommended for lower and upper elementary.

Do you have a favorite anti-war picture book?

Please share it with us.