Two commentaries from the report, Military and Veteran Families and Children: Policies and Programs for Health Maintenance and Positive Development, deepen the discussion about how best to support military and veteran children and families. In the first commentary, Michelle Sherman, who has spent many years working in the Veterans Health Administration (VHA) system, describes innovative efforts of VHA programs to partner with community organizations to better support children and families. She also calls for VHAs to expand their focus to support veterans and their families. (Author abstract…
Brief
Deployment and its possible consequences, including a service member's injury, psychological trauma, or death, put considerable strain on military children and families. Most of them are resilient in the face of this adversity. Still, the psychological distress they experience can reverberate through the family, impairing the healthy functioning of parents and children alike. As a nation, we owe these families a system of care that emphasizes not just treatment but also prevention, helping them draw on their own resources for resilience, as well as those of their communities. We propose a…
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Journal Article This issue of The Future of Children seeks to integrate existing knowledge about the children and families of today's United States military; to identify what we know (and don't know) about their strengths and the challenges they face, as well as the programs that serve them; to specify directions for future research; and to illuminate the evidence (or lack thereof) behind current and future policies and programs that serve these children and families. At the same time, it highlights how research on nonmilitary children and families can help us understand their military-connected counterparts…
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Journal Article The development of the San Diego Military Family Collaborative, comprised of more than 400 representatives from over 80 unique public, private, faith-based, military, and governmental organizations, is described. Strategies the Collaborative is using to coordinate efforts to support military families are discussed, and their long-term goal of aligning shared measurement and activities in child abuse and neglect prevention is emphasized. 6 references.
This tip sheet summarizes what is known about the couple relationships of service members after deployment and recommends ways in which safety-net service providers can offer support to them in maintaining successful couple relationships. (Author abstract)
A Support and Resource Guide for Working With Military Families is designed to help safety-net service providers and other stakeholders sustainably integrate healthy marriage and relationship education into their services for military service members and their families. The guide uses a three stage process, allowing readers to: (1) better understand military structure and culture; (2) better understand and connect with existing resources for military service members and their families; and (3) learn more about the role that core marriage and relationship skills play in work, school, family,…
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Journal Article With current U.S. combat opertions in Afghanistan and Iraq, military families are facing an unprecedented level of stress because of repeated and lengthy separations. The impact on children of these separations from one or both parents depends to a large extent on the remaining caregiver's ability to respond to the needs of the children. By providing supportive programs sensitive to the unique needs of military families with infant and toddlers, community initiatives such as Operation Parenting Edge (OPE) are able to maximize coping skills and promote resiliency in these families. (Author…
Part of a series of fact sheets that discuss how and why the child support program provides innovative services to families across six interrelated areas to assure that parents have the tools and resources they need to support their children and be positively involved in raising them, this fact sheet focuses on how the child support program and military and veterans organizations can work together to help parents who serve our country meet their responsibilities to their children and be the parents they want to be. (Author abstract modified)
