It is my daughter's Open Day at school today.I head to the school with excitement since I was looking forward to see her work and enjoy a peek at her learning experiences.I knew she had been working on important topics at school: peace, events in the country and other things of that sort.So I just could not wait. She pulls my hand and leads me to different areas within her classroom. Some showed art, others were about writing pieces and there were plenty about science. Then came the wall about being a leader. Every child in the classroom wrote a piece about what they thought a leader of a country should do or be. "What a fascinating idea," I thought as I was heading toward the writings decorating the wall.

As I got closer, I scanned with my eyes for paper with her name. Here it was, her name written in black on the paper. Then my eyes caught a shocking statement also written on the same paper. Shocking, painful and full of fear. "I do not want to be an Egyptian leader because the government police will put me in jail." She wrote those words in a large font that was black. My heart sunk as I struggled to smile and
celebrate her piece.

The rest of the paper was colorful and full of great sentences that my eight-year-old daughter wrote about how a leader should be. But her fear of what a leader's destiny will always be in our country brought a lot of conflicting feelings and questions at that moment. The most prevailing was, did our Arab Spring, with all its passionate call for freedom, bring fear to the hearts of our young children? As we witness the vicious fluctuations of the Arab Spring, will our children grow strong to keep the legacy and fight for it? Or are we unconsciously bringing up another silent, fear-driven generation to enable once again the rise of tyranny? Have we, parents and caregivers, been unaware of how our children are digesting news and the events taking place in our lives? Have we not explained the "what and why" of what is going on?

My daughter witnessed close adults in her life experience conflict, revolt, getting shot, and eventually getting exiled to a different country altogether. She also, like most kids around the region, witnessed a wide variety of turbulence, including school evacuations, gunshots, curfews and news about death, injury and injustice. All of this, I reflected, was too much for us, "the adults," to digest and carry on our shoulders. I cannot begin to imagine how that landed in the consciousness of an eight-year-old.
Children of the Arab Spring have not only witnessed increased amounts of violence and injustice, but they have also been exposed to major life changes: physical, economic, social and cultural.

Those kids witnessed the loss of family members or friends, either for death or conflicting political views. They have also been de-privileged from a certain standard of living they used to have or at least were exposed to anew. As a family and youth coach, I would label any such event as traumatic to a young child, which needs the attention of the parent and caregiver and support to help process the events, make sense of events and store memories in their consciousness as learning experiences that will contribute to their growth and development.

To even take this a step forward, as people calling for freedom, we want to ensure that our children process these events in a way that enables them to express their voice, live their values and not settle for injustice around them. This can only be done if we take the time to actively discuss what is happening, why it is happening, how important it is and whether the price we are paying is high or equivalent to the freedom we one day hope to realize in the region. This is as important as writing about freedom, protesting for it and resisting tyranny in all its faces around the region.

* Istanbul-based parenting coach