Children's Day began as Rose Day in a Massachusetts church in 1857
A pastor in Chelsea, Massachusetts held a special service for the young members of his congregation one June Sunday in 1857 and called it Rose Day. The idea spread and splintered, so today children get their day on 1 June in much of eastern Europe, 20 November at the UN, and 23 April in Turkey.
The Reverend Charles Leonard of the Universalist Church of the Redeemer chose the second Sunday of June for his service. Rose Day was later renamed Flower Sunday and finally Children's Day. Turkey became the first nation to make it an official holiday, fixing 23 April in 1920 and having Mustafa Kemal Atatürk confirm it formally in 1929.
An international version was proclaimed in Geneva in 1925 at the World Conference on Child Welfare. After the Second World War the Women's International Democratic Federation set 1 June as a day for protecting children, first marked in 1950. That date stuck across the Soviet Union and most communist states, from Albania and Cuba to mainland China, Vietnam and Mozambique, and it survives in many of their successors.
The United Nations took a different path. A joint resolution from India and Uruguay, passed on 14 December 1954, urged every country to hold a Universal Children's Day. The chosen date, 20 November, recalls the day in 1959 when member states unanimously backed a declaration of children's rights, and three decades later the General Assembly adopted the legally binding Convention on the Rights of the Child on the same calendar day. Alongside celebration, the occasion is used to draw attention to child labour, which still involves around 153 million children aged 5 to 14.
Local customs vary widely. Nigeria has kept 27 May since 1964, with selected schools marching in parades and children sometimes swapping places with adults for the day. Several central African countries celebrate on 25 December, Tunisia on 11 January, Eritrea on 8 December, and South Africa on the first Saturday of November. South Sudan picks 23 December, said in tribal tradition to be the birthday of its greatest child.
Source: Children's Day
