Whose Children Count as Ours?

Stewardship Essays
Written By Leeca St. Aubin

In September 2026, Canada, Ukraine and Norway announced a Toronto conference to strengthen efforts to bring home Ukrainian children deported or forcibly transferred by Russia, and to support them when they return. Canada also announced funding to help trace children, reunite them with their families and support their recovery.

I am glad they are doing this. A child taken from home should be found. A family waiting for that child deserves every effort we can make.

When I heard about the children, I remembered a nightmare I used to have as a young mother. Bombs were falling, and I was trying to carry all three of my children on my back. I moved between doorways, searching for somewhere to hide them, somewhere the walls might hold. The details changed, but the responsibility never did. The world was collapsing around us, and somehow I still had to keep all three children alive.

The dream returned at least once a year. I would wake in my own bed, in a country at peace, and eventually the fear would leave my body. My children were safe. The walls were standing.

For mothers living through war, there is no waking from it.

I think of a mother in Ukraine listening for bombs while carrying another fear beneath the first: that her child might be taken. Ukraine’s Children of War portal recorded more than 20,600 children deported or forcibly displaced under Russian control, with about 2,650 returned as of September 28, 2026. The full number is difficult to establish. Behind the documented cases are parents who may know their child is alive without knowing where that child sleeps, who is caring for them, or what they have been told about why no one has come.

Taking children can wound the future of a people. Separate a child from family, language and home, and the fear reaches far beyond one household. Other parents begin to wonder whether anything they build for their children can be kept safe. Bringing those children home requires records, cooperation between countries, persistence and political will.

As I read about that effort, I found myself asking what determination we bring to children elsewhere whose lives and futures are being taken from them.

A mother in Gaza may still have her child beside her, but the home, school or hospital that should help keep that child alive may be gone or damaged. In a February 2026 report, UNICEF recorded at least 21,289 children reported killed and 44,500 injured in Gaza since October 2023. Each number was once a child who needed breakfast, comfort, a place to sleep and someone to call when afraid. For the children still living there, survival depends on much more than the end of a bombing. It depends on food, medical care, shelter, education and the chance to grow up without constant fear.

Ukraine and Gaza have different histories, actors and legal questions. They do not call for identical responses. But the differences should make us think carefully about what each group of children needs, rather than allow us to turn away from one of them.

The question reaches farther. In Sudan, UNICEF reported at least 330 children killed or injured in the first six months of 2026. In Somalia, it warned that nearly 1.9 million children could face acute malnutrition that year while aid cuts closed health and nutrition facilities. These figures describe different harms. I do not want to line them up as though children were competing for our grief. I want to know what happens after we hear them. Who is able to reach the children? What help is sustained? What pressure is brought to bear when that help is blocked or withdrawn?

Canada does provide humanitarian assistance to Palestinians and to people affected by the war in Sudan. Aid workers and local communities are doing difficult, essential work. I do not want to erase that work by asking this question. I want us to look at whether the scale and persistence of our response meet the scale of children’s needs.

I also wonder about the way we pay attention. We can tell the story of one child with a name, a photograph and a family waiting for them, while speaking of thousands of others only as a number. Every child deserves the tenderness we give the one whose story we know. Race, religion, geography and political alliances can shape whose story reaches us and how urgently we respond. They are uncomfortable things to examine, but children should not have to overcome our distance from them before we recognize their humanity.

We should do everything possible to find and return Ukrainian children who have been taken. And when we see countries coordinate around that purpose, we can ask what that same seriousness would look like for a Palestinian child needing a functioning hospital, a Sudanese child fleeing violence, or a Somali child whose nearby clinic has closed. The actions will differ. The commitment to the child should hold.

I still remember the feeling inside that old nightmare. Three children on my back. Bombs falling. Doorways that might not hold. The impossible arithmetic of a mother trying to make one body into enough shelter for every child she loves.

I was fortunate. I woke up.

Millions of mothers do not. When they ask the world to see their children, the answer should not depend on whose children we think they are.

They are all our children, or the words mean nothing.

Sources

Leeca St. Aubin
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The Ground Beneath a Promise