Happy International Children's Day, 1 June

On 10 June 1942, in reprisal for the assassination of the Nazi official Reinhard Heydrich, German forces destroyed the village of Lidice near Prague, Czechoslovakia. The men were shot, the women sent to concentration camps, and most of the children taken away and killed. The village was razed and erased from the map.

Two years later, on 10 June 1944, the French village of Oradour-sur-Glane suffered a similar fate, with hundreds of civilians killed, many of them small children. These massacres became symbols of the pain war inflicts on children, and the reason the world needed a day to remind itself to protect its smallest members.

In November 1949, at a meeting in Moscow, the Women's International Democratic Federation proposed making 1 June each year an international day for the protection of children. The aim was to remember children killed in war and to urge governments to care for children's health, education and right to live in peace.

On 1 June 1950 the first celebrations took place in many countries. The United Nations later added a Universal Children's Day, adopting the Declaration of the Rights of the Child in 1959 and the Convention on the Rights of the Child on 20 November 1989. Although countries mark the occasion on different dates, 1 June remains the familiar children's day across much of Asia and Eastern Europe.

Vietnam was among the first countries to mark 1 June, starting in 1950 while the resistance against France was still under way. President Hồ Chí Minh held a special place in his heart for children: every 1 June and Mid-Autumn Festival he would send letters and gifts and remind them to be good and study well.

On 26 January 1990 Vietnam signed the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, and on 20 February 1990 it became the first country in Asia and the second in the world to ratify it. Since then children's rights to life, protection, education and play have been written into many national laws.

Children are like buds on a branch; eating, sleeping and studying well is all it takes to be good.

President Hồ Chí Minh

In 1991 the National Assembly passed the Law on Child Protection, Care and Education, amended in 2004. In 2016 the Law on Children was adopted and took effect on 1 June 2017, setting out the rights of children under 16 and the duties of families, schools, businesses and society in protecting them.

Every June is the nationwide Month of Action for Children, which opens on 1 June. Localities hold festivals, give gifts to children in hardship, run swimming lessons to prevent drowning and spread awareness about child safety. The national child protection hotline 111 is free and takes reports about children at risk of abuse.

1 June falls at the start of summer, just as the school year ends. Playgrounds, community centres and schools fill with festivals, performances, folk games and gifts. Many families take their children out, go to the cinema or simply spend a whole evening listening to their kids' stories.

At work, the unions of many companies host a festival for staff children, give prizes to good students and hand out summer gifts. Some businesses let parents leave early on the afternoon of 1 June. For many working parents that is the most meaningful gift, because what children want most on this day is their parents beside them.