Executive Summary
The war in Ukraine has inflicted unprecedented trauma on the country’s children and youth, disrupting education, displacing millions, and shattering families and communities. Approximately half of all displaced Ukrainians are children, with roughly 4 million experiencing interrupted education and hundreds of thousands unable to attend in-person classes. Exposure to violence, loss, and instability has led to widespread psychosocial distress, including anxiety, depression, and post-traumatic stress, risking a “lost generation” with long-term psychological, social, and educational deficits. This report outlines four interlinked policy priorities to protect and support conflict-affected youth: strengthening mental health and psychosocial support (MHPSS) systems; providing trauma-informed and flexible education; keeping families together and supporting reunification; and locating, protecting, and reintegrating abducted children.
Policy Recommendations
- Strengthening Mental Health and Psychosocial Support Systems for Children – Responsive policy must build on Ukraine’s emerging National Mental Health Action Plan: expanding training for child psychologists and social workers, integrating MHPSS into primary health clinics and schools, and funding community mental health teams that reach displaced families and frontline towns. The World Health Organization reports that Ukraine has developed a “target model” for psychosocial support and oblast-level plans to extend care, but these must be rapidly funded and linked to child protection and educational services.
- Provide Trauma-Informed Education – To prevent a lost generation, education programs must be trauma-sensitive and fully child-centric. This means repairing and retrofitting schools (with shelters and psychosocial support spaces), as well as expanding nonformal and catch-up schooling to reach displaced or refugee children. Teachers and staff should be trained in trauma-informed pedagogy so that classrooms becomes a safe haven where counselors and social workers collaborate with educators.
- Keeping Families Together – Emergency systems like UNICEF/UNHCR “Blue Dot” centers have helped identify unaccompanied children at borders, but a formal child-tracing mechanism is needed both domestically and internationally. Ukraine’s government, with support from donors, should empower social services and nongovernmental organizations to track separated children, verify guardianship, and facilitate cross-line family visits or temporary foster placements. At the same time, social safety nets must support vulnerable families to prevent separation in the first place.
- Finding Abducted Children and Rehabilitation – Policymakers should invest in cross-border family tracing and legal advocacy (collaborating with the Red Cross, the U.N. Missing Children project, and other relevant agencies), as well as documenting and tracking every known case. Regarding reintegration, the needs are complex: returning children will need immediate psychological support, language or educational assistance if they experienced a different curriculum, and careful reintegration into their local communities. Schools and child protection agencies must be ready to give these children additional support – such as tailored counseling and peer support groups – since they might face identity issues or stigma.
The views expressed in this article are those of the author and not an official policy or position of New Lines Institute.