Absence Makes the Heart Grow Stressed

Here’s some more from the recent article, “When the Troops Come Home,” which I have been working slowly through and thinking about over the last week or so. 

More than 2 million American children have sent one or both parents off to our current wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.  In an official 2008 survey of military spouses, 29 percent of the children who had a deployed parent had difficulty reconnecting when the parent returned home. Put another way, 580,000--well in excess of half a million!--children have had their relationship with one or both parents significantly affected by deployment.

Studies show that older children have a harder time than younger ones, a fact I think is well illustrated by the picture here.This is understandable, I think, because as a child’s awareness and emotional development increases, the ability to worry and be stressed in other ways grows with it. 


Another finding is that girls have a harder time than boys.  I would not have guessed this because far more boys have the parent of the same sex deploy, and we hear so much about the importance of parental role models. Could it be that boys are more confident in their ability to go it alone, or perhaps even at a young age, are less likely to admit feeling troubled because males are supposed to be tough?  I would be very curious to hear what readers have to say.

It’s interesting that age five seems to be the point where a child reaches the point wher he or she can process what it means to have a parent leave for an extended period, but at that age they do tend to adjust and adapt fairly quickly both to the absence and the return.

Researchers from the Rand Institute have found that the number of months apart, rather than the number of separations and reunions, is the most important predictor of stress in children.  The Army’s standard twelve-month deployment is harder on children that the Air Force’s shorter but more frequent ones.

Sadly, some military jobs demand so much time away altogether, whether for long or short periods, that some children more or less learn to live without that parent. "They get a little numb, as much as he's gone, to his absence, so they're used to just being Mommy and them," says military spouse Tiffany Gully. “It's sad to say, but he's almost an intruder in the beginning."