Summer and heat are here, and we change our footwear, but which is the most suitable for children's feet? Podiatrist and communicator Neus Moya advises that to choose respectful footwear, you must observe that the child walks exactly the same as if they were barefoot. "The shoe must respect the shape and function of the foot. It must have an anatomical toe box and allow movement".

Almost all children in the world face at least one climate threat. But nearly half – about 1.1 billion children – are exposed to three different climate threats that put their health and survival at risk, according to the report Children’s climate risk report 2026, published this Tuesday by Unicef.

When we talk about health, we often think about habits related to diet or physical activity. However, we know well that health is a much broader concept that includes physical, emotional, social, and community dimensions. Today, in a context where data continues to alert us that children and adolescents are spending more hours in front of screens, doing less physical activity, having less healthy diets, and experiencing an increase in emotional distress, it is necessary to reinforce those spaces that contribute to their integral well-being.Summer camps and colonies are one of these privileged spaces. And precisely now, when school holidays are about to begin and the time for dolce far niente increases considerably, it is important to highlight the role they play in the health and development of children and adolescents. Because beyond being a leisure alternative when school ends, they offer educational experiences that have a direct impact on their present and future well-being.

Sílvia Munt (Barcelona, 1957) is an actress, screenwriter, and director. Last Gaudí Award of Honor. In the autumn, she will premiere a documentary film about Mercè Rodoreda and will direct the play Panorama des del pont.

She was born in the Clot neighborhood, in Barcelona. “But I spent my early childhood and also part of my adolescence in the Canary Islands, because my mother is French but her father is from the Canary Islands. On the one hand, I feel very urban, very much from the neighborhood. My father was from Clot. But, on the other hand, the island, the way of understanding life there... is important to me... And I am a bit of this mix”.

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The end of the school year is approaching, and with it, a scene that repeats in many homes with school-aged children: they arrive with various – if not many – crafts they've made at school, in after-school activities... And the questions return: what should we do with all this? Do we keep it all? Do we throw it all away? Do we leave it at home and gradually discard it after a few days without the children noticing?

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Generosity is not born out of pressure, but out of respect for children's times and needs, and out of support that sets limits with empathy and without imposition.“You must share” is one of the most repeated phrases in parks, schools, and family gatherings. It is said with good intentions, almost as an automatic response, as if it were an unquestionable rule of coexistence. But what if this ingrained demand were interfering with a much deeper learning? What if, instead of educating in generosity, we were promoting responses based on pressure, obligation, or even fear of conflict? Often behind this imperative lies the adult need to resolve situations quickly, to avoid tears or tensions, or even to look good rather than to accompany what is truly a learning process. We turn “sharing” into an immediate duty, with no room to understand what the child is feeling or what they need. And in this apparently harmless gesture, we may be overlooking a key opportunity: to help them build, at their own pace, an authentic understanding of what it means to give, to wait, and to consider others.Sharing is not a simple or spontaneous gesture, no matter how often we take it for granted. It is a complex skill that is built up little by little and involves a whole series of internal learning processes: recognizing that others also have desires and needs, understanding that giving something up does not equate to losing it forever, learning to wait without anxiety, reading the emotions of others, and, above all, feeling that what is one's own is protected. Without this foundation of security, genuine generosity can hardly emerge.

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All testimonies in this report are real cases that have preferred to remain anonymous.If you don't play with me, I won't invite you to my party. If you want me to do that, you'll have to give me a euro. Now I'm angry (and I won't talk to you for days). You are my best friend (but I only play with you when we are alone, when we are at school, I ignore you or I even promote a vote to see who dislikes you in the class). These are seemingly innocent and typical phrases and situations for children – more so for girls – that can be a warning sign of a controlling relationship disguised as friendship. 

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Ramon Mirabet (Sant Feliu de Llobregat, 1984) is a musician, singer and producer. He presents Per sempre més (Columna), an autobiographical and musical book that transforms grief into a celebration of life.

Ramon comes from a family of artists. “My maternal grandfather went from town to town with a friend and recited poems. And it was like that for years until he arrived in Tarragona and in the audience he saw a girl (my grandmother) and they fell in love. They followed their passion, which was circus and variety theatre. She sang rancheras and did a number with puppies, and he was the presenter and imitated Cantinflas”.

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The new court for violence against children and adolescents in Barcelona has received around 300 cases in its first quarter of operation. This court has been functioning since January 1st in the Catalan capital and among the crimes it has most handled are those related to child abuse and sexual assault on minors, according to judicial sources told ARA. In fact, it is responsible for investigating the case of the baby who remains hospitalized for alleged mistreatment and sexual assault by its parents. mistreatment and sexual assault allegedly by their parents.

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The Department of Health has launched an ex officio investigation to gather information on a baby under one month old admitted on March 16 to Vall d'Hebron Hospital in Barcelona due to serious injuries and alleged sexual assault, for which his parents have been in provisional prison since Friday. As reported by El Periódico and confirmed by ARA, the ministry will collect information on the minor from birth and review the causes and pathologies he had suffered until then. In parallel, the Prosecutor's Office has asked the judge investigating the case to interrogate all the doctors who treated the infant to specify the symptoms he had and whether they had detected injuries that could be related to abuse. For now, it is known that the child went through at least four healthcare centers – three hospitals and a primary care center (CAP) – days before the child abuse protocol was activated for various reasons and of different severity, such as mild fever and vomiting.

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Sleeping well is essential, as sleep allows the body and mind to recover and function correctly. In the case of children, sleep takes on even greater importance because it is key to their knowledge and cognitive development. As explained at the Sant Joan de Déu Hospital's Health School, babies and children need deep and restorative sleep to process what they have learned during the day, consolidate memory, and develop their motor and emotional skills. In adolescence, the hormonal changes typical of this stage can make it difficult for them to maintain adequate sleep schedules, which can have consequences on their mood and academic performance.

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Coia Valls (Reus 1960) is an actress, teacher, speech therapist, and writer. In 2010 she won the Néstor Luján prize for historical novels with her first novel, The Jade Princess. She now publishes her tenth, Gaudí's Dream (Rosa dels Vents).

She studied at the Sant Josep school in Reus. “It was a convent school, and my mother started taking me before I was old enough, at two years old, because she had to work and look after my younger sister”. She was a very quiet child. “While my sister would climb everywhere, I was like an artichoke. I would listen, look, play with a toy and could spend hours like that”.

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There are a couple of hours left until a new performance ofThe ferryman At the Teatre Lliure de Montjuïc in Barcelona, ​​eleven-year-old Bruna Luz is restless and starts dancing before going on stage, while she waits for her turn to have her hair done, change, and put on her microphone. Beside her, ten-year-old Bruna Armengol joins in her games and laughs nonstop while waiting for the same. In a little while, they will become Mercy and Honor Carney, and their characters will travel to a rural area of ​​County Armagh in Northern Ireland. It will be a day in late August 1981, and the Carney family will be celebrating Harvest Day. But the festive family day will end in tragedy.

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Having children brought back unresolved wounds from our own childhood. This allowed me to reconnect with the child I once was, reclaim her, and learn to nurture her. I also had the opportunity to understand my own parents. Motherhood places us all in a vulnerable position, but at the same time, it bestows upon us a wisdom that is difficult to find elsewhere. Raising children confronts us with our own shortcomings. During my son's early years, I recovered many memories of when I was a child caring for a younger sibling.

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Parents and children draw a moment, a story, or an anecdote that happened at home. They put down on a piece of paper what they think, feel, or don't dare to say out loud; perhaps out of fear, perhaps due to a lack of trust, or insecurity. It's a simple activity, but it has helped dozens of families, in one way or another, to strengthen their bond, weakened by the hardships of economic difficulties or by a migration process that diminishes parenting skills. "Now my children tell me how they feel, and that has helped me a lot," explains Najam Ul Huda. She is one of the mothers who have come to the Poblenou socio-educational center to improve communication with their children within a program that seeks to strengthen mother-child relationships as a tool for preventing the institutionalization of minors—that is, to avoid the administration having to intervene and separate children from their parents by assuming their custody. Ul Huda says that the various activities they have carried out in this program, launched in 2022 jointly by the Pere Tarrés Foundation and the state coordinator of Salesian Social Platforms, with the collaboration of educational professionals, have helped improve the atmosphere within her family, with her children: she says they spend quality time together. Brenda Hernández nods beside her and recalls that before, in her parents' time, everything was very different. "Now, this interest in dealing with emotions makes the bond with the family stronger," she affirms. Cases like those of Ul Huda and Hernández are indicators that a new pedagogical model that involves children and families can contribute to strengthening family relationships and participation in community activities, argues the Pere Tarrés Foundation. The organization emphasizes that a shift in focus towards building bonds between parents and children can reduce the risk of institutionalizing children, a situation to be avoided as much as possible, underlines the Foundation's deputy director, Rafael Ruiz de Gauna. "The goal is for children not to be in institutions, but to be able to live independently with the best possible abilities," he explains. With the aim of minimizing these cases—prioritizing support for families to ensure children can stay and grow up in their family environment—the Som Veu project was launched in 2022, funded by the European Union's Next Generation fund and the Ministry of Social Rights. The initiative aims to develop a model for preventing institutionalization with proposals for psychological and socio-educational support for the entire family. The model was tested with nearly 600 children and young people and a hundred educational professionals from 39 socio-educational centers in nine regions across Spain.

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Where is the line drawn between rights? Between the legitimate and shared right of teachers to demand decent working conditions and the right of children to fully enjoy their educational process, including outside the classroom? When these two rights conflict, the answer cannot be that one is left hanging. Children's rights are non-negotiable, nor can they be used as leverage in a conflict they did not create and over which they have no power.

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One of the most shameful statistics for a developed country is the percentage of children living at risk of poverty. And at the same time, child poverty is a bad investment for the future. Few long-term investments have a greater return than a happy childhood. This return is not only emotional but also economic. For decades, psychology and empirical evidence have demonstrated that growing up with significant material deprivation has individual and family consequences, extending beyond a single generation, and also impacts social cohesion and a country's future.

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Those of us who work with children in the early stages of education celebrate and applaud the fact that the latest curriculum reform of 2023 affirmed from the outset that "the early childhood education curriculum integrates the first and second cycles into a single educational stage with its own identity." This is a demand that has been made by the educational reform movements, with the journal CHILDHOOD As a keynote speaker, he has championed and defended his position for decades. The problem is that these good intentions, when they come down to earth, end up being just wishful thinking, because the reality is that we have a completely fragmented political landscape.

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It took three years for the courts to recognize that Gambian Saynei Kanteh was indeed a minor, after the Juvenile Prosecutor's Office ruled that he was over eighteen and therefore no longer entitled to public protection. He was immediately removed from the guardianship of the Directorate General for Child Welfare (DGAIA, now the DGPPIA) and expelled from the center where he lived. "I knew he wasn't lying, that I was seventeen, and I trusted that sooner or later..." I would have the papers"," he states.

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In the wake of Greenland, Ukraine, and the future of NATO, there is much talk these days about the foreign policy differences between the United States and Europe. But we cannot overlook the widening gap that exists in domestic politics. At the beginning of the year, the Heritage Foundation, one of thethink tanksone of the most influential people in the US, published areport to "save America by saving the family"Meanwhile, the Trump administration announced a temporary freeze on federal funding for childcare services and family assistance. The time and cost of raising children are presented as a responsibility primarily borne within households, often by women, with increasingly limited public support.

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