By Avina Shokouhi

IranWire

Explosions shake apartment buildings in Tehran, flames light up the night sky in Bushehr, and mothers across the country face an impossible task: how do you explain war to a child?

As conflict escalates between Israel and the Islamic Republic, Iranian mothers are using desperate strategies to shield their children from a reality too harsh for young minds.

Armed with storybooks instead of weapons, they’ve become human shields between their families and the violence outside.

From Tehran to Shiraz, mothers are learning that no wall can block the sounds of war, no lie can quiet a child’s questions, and no game can erase what they’ve seen.

Yet they continue trying, because the alternative - letting war claim their children’s innocence - is unthinkable.

In Tehran, the capital has become a city “drowned in the sound of air defense and explosions,” where even the strongest walls cannot muffle the reality outside.

Samira knows this intimately.

In her small apartment in central Tehran, she has watched her once-solid walls tremble with each explosion.

“You can’t hide the sound of bombers and air defense,” she explains. “Ten double-pane windows can’t muffle this damn sound. Wherever you turn on the TV, it’s only war news. Even if you turn on a cartoon, it still can’t silence the sound of reality outside.”

Her eight-year-old son, Soren, was at their neighbor’s house when she went to collect him, only to find war coverage blazing across the television screen.

In that moment, maternal instinct transformed her into something more than a mother - she became a living shield.

“As soon as his eyes caught the fire and sirens, I made myself a wall between him and the TV,” she recalls. “I had to prevent it. Those scenes shouldn’t have been etched in his mind.”

But hiding the images is only half the battle. When Soren noticed his father was missing, he asked, “Has Daddy gone to war?” - a question that hit Samira like shrapnel.

Her response reveals the desperate creativity that crisis demands of parents: she turned to the one thing that could transport her son away from the war zone outside their door.

“Soren loves stories. The best thing I felt could bring him out of this atmosphere was books,” she explains. “I said, ‘Soren, why don’t we read the books you really love again?’ And then we opened all the books he loved together and started reading and playing the role of each character together. Suddenly, the room was filled with the voices of characters who were happy and lived in peace and tranquility.”

Yet even in this small victory, Samira recognizes the temporary nature of her success.

She knows that each new day brings a fresh wave of questions: “Why is the sky still making noise? Why is everyone worried?” They hang in the air like unexploded bombs, ready to shatter the fragile calm she’s built.

“How long should we both live in the government’s lies and lie to our children? How long should we both be afraid and pretend everything is fine?”

1,054 kilometers south in Bushehr, where the nuclear power plant makes every explosion feel like an existential threat, Shayesteh faces a different kind of terror.

Her seven-year-old son, Kia, saw what no child should: flames from bombed gas refineries lighting up the night sky.

“When he saw the flames of fire, he said, ‘Does this mean they’ll hit our house too?’” Shayesteh recounts.

“I froze for a few seconds. I really didn’t know what to say,” she admits. “How could that level of fire, that heavy smoke and ground tremor be hidden from Kia’s small and wide eyes? I knew if I didn’t give an answer, fear would take root in his heart. But I didn’t want to lie either, not to him, not to myself.”

Faced with this impossible choice between truth and protection, Shayesteh chose the universal language of childhood: play.

“I told Kia, ‘Let’s play hide and seek.’ I said, ‘Who will close their eyes first?’ I tried to distract his mind. I had to make his focus move away from the window and the flames. And it was a miracle. He got busy. He laughed. He hid behind the sofa. That was the moment I realized there was still time… his childhood was still alive.”

In Kermanshah, a city that bears the scars of Iran’s eight-year war with Iraq, Ziba refuses to let history repeat itself in her children’s lives

She said, “I don’t want Hana, my little daughter, to grow up with fear. I don’t want the image of warplanes and news of death and destruction to become part of her childhood.”

Five-year-old Hana’s mix of curiosity and sensitivity makes her both especially vulnerable and especially hard to shield.

Ziba knows that children pick up on the emotional atmosphere, even if they don’t understand the adult words for danger.

“Just seeing anxiety in my eyes is enough for her. Just hearing repeated phone calls, or when the power cuts and I quickly light a candle, that’s a sign itself,” Ziba explains. “I try to turn the home into a safe island for her. However possible. You know, however possible.”

“We sat with the children and built a paper house. I said, ‘This is our house, a magical house that changes every day, gets better and more beautiful.’ We change its name together every day—one day it becomes a magical forest house, one day a white castle. This way my children believe there’s still something that’s safe.”

In Shiraz, the city of poetry and music now muted by fear, Sahar has redefined her role as a mother in terms that would be tragic if they weren’t so necessary.

Her daughter, Sorvin, once fell asleep to lullabies and gentle bedtime stories, but now requires a different kind of protection.

“She always fell asleep with the sound of calm music I played and the gentle tone with which I read books to her,” Sahar recalls. “But now those sounds are no longer enough. Now I must muffle the sound of war before it reaches her room.”

“It’s really hard work - to pretend everything is normal when your heart is trembling with terror,” Sahar acknowledges. “But perhaps for mothers of this land, this role has become normal. Because all our lives, since we can remember, we’ve been in the heart of crisis - crisis of war, crisis of poverty, crisis of truth.”

“Our lives are built on lies. When you’re forced to tell your child everything is fine while there are a thousand sounds in your head, when you have to say the sound of an explosion is fireworks while you yourself still jump at the sound of gunfire during protests.”