Celebrating how families kept children going through COVID
For Parenting Month, we asked our followers to send in moments of comfort and joy that kept them going during COVID, then turned them into a unique and inspiring artwork.
COVID has been a disaster for the whole world, but especially children, who found themselves plunged into a frightening new world of restrictions, closed schools, health fears, and uncertainty over the future. Fortunately, most of them had something powerful on their side to protect them - and that's the love of parents or caregivers, which we are now celebrating in this unique and beautiful digital mural capturing thirteen scenes of Cambodian parental love.
June was International Parenting Month and so we asked our followers to share their own real-life moments of family joy and comfort throughout the pandemic. Working with the wonderful arts non-profit Phare Ponleu Selpak, we captured these moments in art and have now gathered them all together in this single artwork celebrating the resilience and love of families.
Please take a moment to look closely at the picture above and think about what it represents. Feel free to click on it and zoom in on the scenes of family love, all based on real life stories from our followers and the artists. Look for the parents who are teaching their kids the Khmer alphabet at home. Try and find the father teaching his son to keep himself safe by washing his hands. Look for the family catching up with a relative in lockdown by Zoom. These are four scenes, now try and find the other nine!
These might all sound like small moments but each of them meant the world to those children at that time. They are the moments when their education was kept alive, or they were provided with comfort when they were frightened, or they were taught how to keep themselves safe, or they felt a moment of beauty and normality in an abnormal situation.
UNICEF is grateful to all the people who told us their stories and all the parents and caregivers who have sacrificed so much to protect children during this pandemic. It is our honour to tell these stories in this artwork. Please share this image with your friends and celebrate Cambodian families in all their wonderful diversity and strength. The pandemic isn't over yet, by any means, and we know many families continue to face great hardship. The only way children will get to the other side is through family love.
Download full-size image here!
