Military Children and Families

"[R]esearchers have yet to examine military children's strengths, how these strengths can sustain them through adversity, or how their own strengths interact and develop with the strengths of their military families and the communities where they live. Moreover, we have yet to fully identify and assess the resources for positive development that exist in these children's schools, in the military, and in their civilian communities."

This issue of The Future of Children (Volume 23, Number 2) seeks to: integrate existing knowledge about the children and families of today's United States (US) military; identify what we know (and don't know) about their strengths and the challenges they face; specify directions for future research; and illuminate the evidence (or lack thereof) behind current and future policies and programmes that serve these children and families. Contributors to the volume also highlight how research on nonmilitary children and families can help us understand their military-connected counterparts and, in turn, how research on military children can contribute both to a general understanding of human development and to our knowledge of other populations of children living in the US.

"Noting the interconnections among service members, families, and child health and functioning, and how these interconnections influence child development, we support a theoretical approach that incorporates a life-course perspective." That is, the contributors have a shared recognition of the need to understand the mutually influential connections between the development of children and the development of their parents, both during the parents' periods of service and in the later periods of the life course - as they live in their families, work, grow older, move, experience historic events like war, and face life events that are both ordinary (such as puberty, or starting and finishing the school years) and extraordinary (such as a parent's injury or death). "Of course, we need good science to produce such knowledge about military children, knowledge that will let us better take care of their health and support their development through effective individual, family, and community prevention and intervention strategies."

Contents include:

• Military Children and Families: Introducing the Issue
• The Demographics of Military Children and Families
• Economic Conditions of Military Families
• Military Children from Birth to Five Years
• Child Care and Other Support Programs
• Resilience among Military Youth
• How Wartime Military Service Affects Children and Families
• When a Parent Is Injured or Killed in Combat
• Building Communities of Care for Military Children and Families
• Unlocking Insights about Military Children and Families
• Afterword: What We Can Learn from Military Children and Families

Specific communication lessons are included in various components of these contributions. For example, the authors of "Military Children from Birth to Five Years" suggest that, to prepare preschoolers for deployment, parents should:

• "Talk to children about what is happening and what to expect in language they can understand.
• Listen to their concerns and answer in simple language.
• Acknowledge both their own feelings and the children's, while emphasizing that the children will be cared for and kept safe.
• Work with children to develop a plan to stay connected to the deployed parent. In addition to social networking, Internet and phone communication, children and deployed parents can exchange meaningful objects - the child might give a treasured stuffed animal, the service member might share a rank insignia or patch - and then share pictures electronically or through the mail of those objects in each other's daily lives.
• Create a daily ritual that children can perform while the parent is away. For example, children might include the absent parent when saying prayers at night, listen every day to a recording that the deployed parent has made, or look at pictures of the deployed parent while reading a bed-time story.
• Identify and match feelings with behaviors so that the young child recognizes that behavior (good and bad) has meaning.
• Let children adjust to separation and loss in their own way, listen to their feelings, and provide support.
• Create an environment to appropriately share emotions. For example, a mother crying in front of her child because she is sad or under stress might explain it in a way the child can understand: 'Mommy is sad because Daddy is gone. I cry when I am sad, but when I am done, I do the things I need to do.' This gives the pre-schooler a model of sharing emotion in a constructive way."

Themes of the issue include:

• "Military children are resilient....Resilience is a product of the relationships between children and the people and resources around them. In this sense, military life, along with its hardships, offers many sources of resilience - for example, a strong sense of belonging to a supportive community with a shared mission and values.
• Military children are everywhere, but they are not always visible....Even when they are near an installation, and especially when they are far away from one, schools, community organizations and others often don't know who among the children they serve is a military-connected child and who is not.
• Military children can help us understand all children, and vice versa....[T]he struggles and achievements of military children and families, and the successes and failures of programs designed to support them, hold valuable lessons for all of us.
• We need better research about military children and families. For instance, we need more long-term research that follows military children from birth to adulthood, through the many transitions in their lives, so that we can...learn more about their strengths, resilience, and social support networks."

Policy implications outlined in the publication include:

• Base programmes for military children on sound evidence.
• Centre programmes for military children with strategies that build on the strengths that they, their families, and their communities already possess.
• Break down barriers for military children - e.g., by routinely flagging military family status in children's health and educational records so that awareness of their needs follows them wherever they go.
• Prepare now so that the next time the US engages in an armed conflict, it is possible to more quickly and efficiently provide military children and families the kinds of support they need.