Children’s Day is a national holiday celebrated in Romania and it is held on June 1 every year. Children’s Day is not just an event in Romania, it is also celebrated in many different countries and is an official UN global observance.
Children’s Day is an international celebration intended to bring nations together to promote child welfare, informs independent.co.uk.
The International Children’s Day was first proposed as an international observance in 1925, at the first conference dedicated to children’s welfare and held in Geneva, Switzerland. Many governments have adopted it as a national observance on June 1.
The first country to declare a national holiday for its youngsters was Turkey, which did so on 23 April 1929.
The United Nations (UN) formally inaugurated Children’s Day as an international event in 1954, the celebration subsequently becoming associated with the UN’s Declaration of the Rights of the Child five years later and marked on the date of that legislation’s adoption thereafter, 20 November. The Declaration is so important because it set in stone a key universal value for the first time, stating unequivocally that “mankind owes to the child the best it has to give.”
The day’s stated aim is to encourage “worldwide fraternity and understanding between children” and invite pre-teens to think about their place in the world and consider what issues they think are important and how society might seek to address them.
In Romania, the Parliament of Children decided in 2016 to promote a draft law aiming to make June 1 a legal national holiday. The campaign was supported by Itsy Bitsy FM, the children’s radio station. The project was approved by the Parliament of Romania at the end of 2016. Starting from 2017, June 1 has become an official holiday in Romania.
The Holy Synod of the Romanian Orthodox Church established in 2009 to dedicate the first Sunday of June to the mothers, the fathers and their children educated in the light of the Christian faith.
“In the family, the child begins to understand the mystery of God’s paternal love for all people. Therefore, a child’s education means not only knowledge and preparation for material life, but also spiritual growth or the cultivation of the goodness of the soul, as beauty in its relationship with God and with others”, transmitted Patriarch Daniel in his 2022 message for the Sunday of Parents and Children.
Photography courtesy of the Basilica.ro / Deacon Iulian Dumitraşcu
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