Nondeployed Spouses

How Children Are Affected By Deployments

As a military spouse I am well aware of the sacrifices that I have made and continue to make to support my husband in his chosen career. However, just recently as my children began to grow to an age of asking questions and learning to understand I began to question how this lifestyle may ultimately impact their emotional and physical wellbeing. With that in mind I decide to look at research that had a focus on how recent deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan had affected the children of those deployed men and women. “Children of National Guard Troops Deployed in the Global War on Terrorism” was primarily observational, but the children and spouses were given questionnaires at different stages to help

They were interested in finding if children would show emotional signs of discomfort, problems with school, or if they would be able to adapt to the deployment over time. The participants included 18 children, 7 females and 11 males. All 13nondeployed spouses that reported information on their children were female. The participants were only representative of ten independent families. These numbers are quite small, and although the researchers were able to show some correlation, more research among larger groups would be recommended from what I have learned in class. The researchers also address the issue and refer to other research that has been conducted previously to help reinforce their

However, the surveys reported by the children showed signs that many were able to adjust to the deployment over a period of time. It is also understood by the article that the nondeployed spouse/parent reported that the children did not show signs of adjustment until the post-deployment stage. Some data that I found interesting was how many children showed at risk behavior or emotions during the deployment stage. The article speaks of those children having more significant problems in school than when they were in the pre-deployment stage. Pre-deployment there were two children with at risk school problems, during the deployment stage there were six. The same data can be shown for children that were classified as inattentive or hyperactive. There was one at risk child pre-deployment. During the deployment stage there were six at risk and one clinical. The good news about the data that was collected is that we are able to see that although there was these very concerning spikes during the deployment stage, the children were able to recover