“Dynamic Force Employment” When I first heard this term, I thought it was a new program designed to help military spouses find jobs. There are new initiatives being created all the time to support spouses and families and I thought this might be one of them. I was wrong.
In this video blog, Dr. Libby Parins and Eddie Black discuss his experiences, emotions, and challenges upon returning from deployment.
Recently I reviewed the current literature on military families and deployment in preparation for updating the Center for Deployment’s (CDP) online course, The Impact of Deployment on Families and Children. While this is a topic that I’ve been teaching since I first joined the CDP almost nine years ago, I was excited when I ran across an article that summarized the deployment cycle challenges that military families face in a new way.
While reading Dr. Brim’s recent 5-year retrospective of the CDP’s blog, I was reminded that back in 2014 I’d written a blog post summarizing the RAND report on the methodology and baseline sample of the Deployment Life Study. The Deployment Life Study is a longitudinal study launched in 2009 that was designed to look at the antecedents, correlates, and consequences of family readiness across the deployment cycle (where family readiness was defined as the state of “being prepared to effectively navigate the challenges of daily living experienced in the unique context of military service”). The results from this study were actually published about a year ago (it’s amazing how time flies!), so I thought this would be a great opportunity to take a deeper look at the results of the study.
April is the Month of the Military Child and as I think about why we set-aside a month for this purpose, I reflect on the phrase “Kids serve, too.” You’ll often hear this phrase used as a short-hand acknowledgement of the fact that children of our military Service members make sacrifices right alongside their parents. The life of a military child includes challenges such as frequent relocations, long separations from a deployed parent (or parents) and the uncertainty that can come from being a part of a military-connected family. Since 2001, over two million children have experienced the military deployment of a parent with many of them experiencing multiple deployments.