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March 20, 2026 / Emily Graham  - For busy parents tracking Middle East issues while juggling work, school schedules, and everyday responsibilities, it can be hard to notice when concern turns into parental anxiety that follows everyone into the room. The core tension is real: staying informed can feel responsible, yet the stress can quietly color conversations, patience, and routines in ways kids absorb. Anxiety effects on children often show up indirectly, so even “normal” days can carry a heavier emotional tone than intended. Recognizing the parental anxiety impact is the first step toward protecting children’s emotional well-being and supporting family mental health.

How Parent Stress Becomes Kid Stress

Kids don’t just hear what you say about scary events. They also pick up what your body and tone are communicating, then adjust their own behavior to match the emotional “weather” at home. Over time, that transmission can turn ongoing worry into kid-sized signals like irritability, clinginess, stomachaches, or trouble settling at night.

This matters because children often can’t name what’s wrong, but they can show it through sleep, mood, and school focus. A meta-analysis revealed an association between parental stress and both emotional and behavioral problems in children, which helps explain why small changes at home can have outsized effects.

Imagine you’re scrolling headlines while making dinner, shoulders tight, snapping at small delays. Your child may not understand the news, but they can feel the tension and start melting down at bedtime or zoning out in class.

How counter‑recruitment is evolving to meet a new generation of youth facing economic precarity, digital militarism, and the search for meaningful, peaceful futures. 

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April 18, 2026 / NNOMY Staff / National Network Opposing the Militarization of Youth (NNOMY) - For more than two decades, counter‑military recruitment has been one of the most persistent forms of peace activism in the United States. It has survived political cycles, funding droughts, shifting school policies, and the rise of digital recruitment. Yet the heart of the work has remained constant: protecting young people’s right to a future that is not defined by economic desperation or military necessity. What has changed is the world young people are inheriting — and the strategies required to meet them where they are.

Today’s youth are navigating a landscape shaped by climate anxiety, economic precarity, racial injustice, digital surveillance, and a profound distrust of institutions. They are not indifferent to the future; they are acutely aware that the systems around them are unstable. In this context, counter‑recruitment cannot simply warn students away from enlistment. It must offer a narrative of possibility — one that affirms their dignity, names the pressures they face, and opens pathways toward meaningful, peaceful work.

At the center of this narrative is a simple truth: young people deserve a future that doesn’t require enlistment. This is not a slogan; it is a moral and structural claim. It acknowledges that military recruitment in the United States does not target opportunity. It targets inequality. It seeks out students whose communities have been stripped of resources, whose schools are underfunded, whose families face economic strain, and whose futures feel uncertain. Recruiters do not appear randomly. They appear where the state has failed to provide alternatives.

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Tuesday, April 14, 2026 / yes! Solutions Journalism -  A bolder antiwar movement is desperately needed at this moment to prevent the US-Israeli war in the Middle East from escalating further. While slogans against militarism were heard at the historic No Kings protests, we also need to build something more enduring, localized, and concrete to bring the genocidal attacks on Lebanon and Iran to a halt.

Veteran organizing was key to ending the U.S. war on Vietnam. While the movement against the Iraq war did not succeed in preventing the U.S. operation, veteran organizing planted the seeds for long-term efforts to turn youth against war. Writing for YES! in 2023 on the 20th anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, Ruben Abrahams Brosbe reported on efforts by veterans "to counter both the narrative and incentives that military recruiters offer young people" and "share the truth about traumatic personal experiences as well as practical information":

"I think it's super trippy, that there are children who are old enough to be in the military and being deployed to Iraq, who were not born when the war started. That is something that is just devastating and tragic to me," Damiani says. "It fuels my fire to keep talking to the kids, because they need to know." – Ruben Abrahams Brosbe 

Amid war build-up, Selective Service System sends the White House its plan to identify and locate potential draftees

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April 9, 2026 / Edward Hasbrouck / Antiwar.com - On March 30th, the Selective Service System (SSS) sent the White House its proposed regulations for “automatic” [sic] draft registration for review and approval before they are made public. This is the first visible step in the transition from trying to get young men to sign themselves up for a military draft, to trying to sign them up “automatically” by aggregating data requisitioned from other Federal agencies.

This year-long process began with the enactment of the SSS proposal for “automatic” registration in December 2025. The new scheme is supposed to go into operation in December 2026.

The SSS has been keeping a low profile to avoid calling attention to its attempt to lay new groundwork for a draft in the middle of a major military escalation. The SSS hasn’t issued a press release in the four months since the enactment of the “automatic” registration law, has no details of its plans for “automatic” registration on its website, and has delayed responding to my FOIA request for those plans. This has led to hasty and credulous reports in the last few days by journalists who saw the notice of the proposed rules but hadn’t followed the legislation, didn’t know to expect this next step in the process, and weren’t aware of the widespread and increasingly organized opposition to this plan.

  español - This segment aired on April 8, 2026 on Here & Now.

April 8, 2026 / Indira Lakshmanan, Ashley Locke, & Grace Griffin / wbur.org - During the Vietnam War, nearly 500,000 men in the U.S. applied for conscientious objector exemptions to avoid the draft. But since the country moved to an all-volunteer military force in 1973, those applications have dropped significantly.

Until now.

The nonprofit Center on Conscience and War, which advises service members on filing conscientious objections, says the number of conscientious objector applications has increased sharply since the U.S. and Israel launched war on Iran in late February.

He said in a typical year, the center sees about 50 conscientious objector applications from active-duty military personnel. But that number has sharply increased since the U.S. and Israel launched the war in Iran in February.

Since this war started,” Mike Prysner, an Iraq War veteran who is the executive director of the Center of Conscience and War, said, “we fielded hundreds of calls from active-duty military who do not want to participate and are strongly opposed to the war.”