My Life As A Military Spouse

Soldiers’ children deal with deployments better than expected.....

Soldiers’ children deal with deployments better than expected, a recent Army War College study has found.

The study comes less than two months after a RAND Corp. study found that military children “experienced greater emotional or behavioral difficulties than their civilian counterparts.”
The war college study, while acknowledging that deployments do cause some degree of stress for children, found “an unanticipated and remarkable resiliency in most Army adolescents in dealing with lives marked by multiple deployments.”

Of the 559 children surveyed, 56 percent said they coped well or very well with deployments. Only 17 percent said they were coping poorly or very poorly.

The study was conducted by researchers Leonard Wong and Stephen Gerras, both retired Army officers.

Michelle Sherman, a child psychologist who specializes in military families, said the tough times that servicemembers’ children go through can be the cause of both problems and resiliency.
Children who are worried about how their parent are doing will naturally be more anxious, but the experience also allows them to draw on strength that perhaps they weren’t aware of, she said.

Also, young children of servicemembers are used to their parents being away, said Patricia Driscoll, president of the Armed Forces Foundation, a nonprofit group that gives cash grants to wounded servicemembers and their families.

“A lot of these kids were born during the war and their fathers, their mothers are going back and forth in multiple deployments so this is actually their norm, they don’t know anything else,” said Driscoll, who wrote a book about traumatic brain injury and post-traumatic stress disorder.

Driscoll also said it isn’t fair to compare children of military families to civilian ones because they deal with different emotional issues.

“What I see a lot of these kids dealing with, the problems that they’re dealing with, is more of the family dynamic: Not so much mom or dad is not here; it’s more of the emotional issues with mom or dad coming home as a kind of different person,” she said.

Army teens coping better with deployments

Army adolescents’ views on how they are coping with their parents’ multiple deployments differ markedly from their parents’ perceptions, according to a new Army War College study.

While 56 percent of the 559 adolescents from ages 11 to 17 who participated in a survey said they deal well or very well with their parents’ deployments, only 36 percent of their soldier-parents said they thought their children cope well or very well.

Soldiers also perceive that their adolescents have a cumulative increase in stress with multiple deployments — while adolescents actually reported a trend of decreasing stress with each deployment.

“When the results came out, we looked at each other and said, ‘We didn’t expect this,’ ” said retired Army Lt. Col. Leonard Wong, a research professor in the Strategic Studies Institute at the Army War College in Carlisle, Pa., who co-authored the study with retired Col. Stephen Gerras, professor of behavioral sciences in the school’s Department of Command, Leadership and Management.

Seeking an explanation for why soldiers are more pessimistic about their children’s ability to cope with deployments than the children themselves, the authors said part of the answer may be simple guilt.

“Who’s the reason this whole [deployment] situation exists? And if they’re doing well without you, what does that say?” Wong said.

As to why soldiers think the stress is cumulative across multiple deployments, while many adolescents don’t, Wong said, “Perhaps soldiers tend to keep a teary farewell or an emotional phone call as the salient memory of their child during a deployment,” the researchers reported in the study. “Parents may tend to forget or at least not realize that children often mature through hardships.”

Wong noted that 17 percent of the youth respondents said they cope poorly or very poorly with their parents’ deployments. If that number is extrapolated to the entire Army population of teenagers this age, it means about 20,000 are doing poorly.

“That’s not a good situation,” Wong said.

The researchers said the results cannot be generalized across the entire population of Army children because most Army children are younger than the respondents in this survey.

Predictors for coping

While strong families and a strong non-deployed parent are an important influence on youth and their ability to cope well, as expected, there were some other predictors.

The strongest predictor of a child’s overall ability to cope with a life of deployments was the child’s perception that their deployed parent is making a difference, researchers found.

The survey was sent electronically last year to 34,500 soldiers within Army Forces Command stationed at large Army installations, who had at least one child between ages 11 and 17. The soldiers’ spouses and adolescents also were given access to separately tailored surveys.

Of those, 2,006 soldiers responded, a response rate of 5.8 percent. In addition, 718 spouses and 559 adolescents participated.

The survey asked questions about the anxiety, nervousness, and worry experienced by the child during the deployment. Questions were asked about whether the child has trouble sleeping, or has troubling thoughts, for example.

For children who did not have a parent currently deployed, stress levels were significantly higher in older children, possibly in part reflecting the complex lives of teenagers, researchers said. Children ages 11 to 13 with a parent deployed did report higher stress levels. But those ages 14 to 16 reported lower stress than those children who did not have a parent deployed.

In addition to the electronic survey, researchers individually interviewed 100 adolescents at eight installations “to put flesh on the bones” and provide some understanding of the survey results, Wong said.

These interviews suggested that children 14 to 16 often enjoy their independence and experience less stress when the soldier parent is absent. “My dad — he’s the one who enforces the discipline, and my mom’s kind of lenient,” one 15-year-old told researchers. “When he left, I went through a phase where I got into trouble — talking back to my mom, and going out when I wanted. ... But now that he’s back — not anymore!”

Among other findings:

• More and deeper communication between the child and the parent in the war zone doesn’t always mean less stress. The difference in stress associated with monthly and weekly communications was small, but stress levels were significantly higher for children who communicate several times a week with their parent. But that could mean kids with higher stress communicate with their parent more, not that the communication is causing stress, the researchers said.

• The more that adolescents participated in sports activities, the less stress they reported. But the survey revealed another wrinkle here: The 30 percent of youths who said they “never” participated in sports or clubs reported lower stress levels than those who “rarely” participated. Researchers realized with later interviews they had neglected to include an activity used by many children as a distraction from the stresses of deployment: video games.

The study comes on the heels of another report from the Rand Corp. think tank, which found that military children in its study had more emotional difficulties compared with national samples. The more cumulative time a parent was deployed, the more problems the children had, Rand found.

The cumulative time away from home was more important than the number of deployments, researchers said.

The Army War College researchers looked at the number of deployments since Sept. 11, 2001, not cumulative time away from home.

posted by LoveMyTanker @ 10:41 PM