North Korean leader Kim Jong Un declared an “intensifying” fight against foreign influence on kids on Monday[…]
Kim made the remarks on the final day of a large-scale national conference on improving government control over child-raising, an event the leader considers “more important than others” due to its role in ensuring “patriotism and loyalty” to his rule from a young age

“The struggle against socially alien phenomena is now intensifying,” Kim told the Fifth National Meeting of Mothers on its second and final day, suggesting that foreign pop culture remains popular[…]
Kim called out “some mothers” who “don’t do anything about their kids speaking and acting in a way not of our style”[…]
One way Kim said mothers bring their kids in line is to send them to experience difficult living conditions while working for the nation

Military service and construction sites are “revolutionary universities which give the children valuable experiences of life that cannot be gained in the yard of their families and cultivate the spirit of loving their comrades and the collective”[…]
State media promoted a story of an 18-year-old “virgin girl soldier” who died after working through a severe injury at a construction site as an example of patriotism[…]
In his speech on the first day of the conference on Sunday, Kim made a rare mention of North Korea’s “decreasing birth rate”[…]
A group of children recited a congratulatory poem[…]where they primarily praised Kim Jong Un and former DPRK leaders as well as mothers who followed core party teachings

They declared that North Korean children are “excited” to be sent by their mothers to work at “places the Party calls hard and difficult worksites” — like “coal mines, farms, villages and new [skyscraper] construction projects”

Defector testimony has long told of adults mobilizing children to mines and other dangerous worksites, while state media published images of young children being sent off to coal mines in 2021