My oldest is four, so not quite there yet. Her bunny just died... this is the first little bit that she has to digest to understand.

No one can simply in short words explain to a child the why of wars. This necessitates a huge web of understanding and a child that asks this question is just about to pick up the first thread of this web.

Where do you even start? (You start with what's in front of you, of course.)

With every subject, you have to back up... If you touch politics e.g., you have to SLOWLY make her understand what politics is (not many ppl understand this at all), and why what we see on an international level grows out of group dynamics that play out even in the family, in the classroom. Grows out of chimp group dynamics, in the end.

All this takes time. she will have to grow into the understanding as she grows up.

And the most important part will take a very long time indeed: To see how the seed of all our problems lies within all of us. Not bc we are somehow 'evil', but bc we are human.

A monkey brain riding on a mammalian brain, riding on a reptile brain, riding on a fish brain. We can't just discard who we are. And true understanding won't come before a person sees all this in themselves and is able to accept it as 'yes, this is me'.

All our understanding will forever be partial. No one can grasp the whole, it is too big, too convoluted, we have too much resistance, bc we do not like what we see.

So to answer your question:

I drilled this into my kids from earliest childhood on:

How do you eat an elephant?

Bit by bit by bit!