More than 524,000 soldiers with children have deployed in support of the war effort in the Army alone. As of June 30, 142,000 Army children were dealing with the absence of a deployed parent.How are they doing?
I wrote yesterday about the findings in an upcoming Rand Corporation study that demonstrate the negative effects of lengthy, repeated deployments on the education of military children. At the conference where these findings were shared, Amy Richardson of the Rand Corporation offered a number of ideas about what could be done to help. Most of the suggestions are not new, but reinforce what we have already intuitively known, or been told by previous research. While many of these ideas are good, I had some misgivings, because in trying to help, it's important that we don't inadvertently turn military children into victims of our concern.
Improve school services. School counselors need better access to information on services that can help Army families. The Army also should increase and improve the activities of school liaison officers and encourage them to foster a more collaborative effort with school administrators.
Improve mental health services. The Army’s behavioral health care capacity would be improved by increasing pay and other benefits to attract more specialists. Free, community-based mental health care support should be fostered through grant funding or cooperative efforts.Telepsychiatry would offer a valuable resource to Guard and Reserve families in remote locations. The Army already has a pilot program at Fort Bragg, N.C., and Fort Drum, NY to develop this service.
Improve community services. There should be more regional or statewide social events to minimize social isolation for Guard and Reserve servicemembers and their families. Also, a social networking site especially for military youth, with instant messaging and chat rooms, would be helpful.
The most obvious and critical need of all, however, is to know who the military children are. Military leaders should create a method to inform schools about which children are military and the status of parental deployment. Ideally, this information would be fed directly from the Army to the schools. In the alternative, the Rand Corporation suggested that a voluntary form handed out at the start of the year to all school families.
This last gave me pause. Having the information is critical, but the way it is obtained could have a huge effect on the children. Overt methods, such as the voluntary form, might unleash a self-fulfilling prophesy. It’s important to be worried about military children’s ability to thrive, but possibly counterproductive to convey the message to the child that we think there’s a reason they might not.
For every child who appreciates knowing the extra attention will be there, perhaps there is another who decides there’s little point in trying to thrive. We have to be careful that in our good intentions we don’t plant a seed of self doubt or lowered expectations. Military children don’t want our pity, and they aren’t an alien species. They’re just children with some added stress in their lives. We should care equally about all children, but we owe something special to these. We need to find a way to make services feel casual, normal, easily accessible, and, where possible, fun. Grave faces and worried looks are not good for any child trying to make his or her way in difficult times.
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