Website has advice for military parents

Website has advice for military parents
AP
October 2, 2012

BOSTON (AP) — A new website has launched that is aimed at giving advice to military parents on helping their children cope with stress.

Content will deal with helping children get through a parent’s military deployment and adjust to the service member’s return to family life.

The website at Staying Strong.org is connected to the Home Base Program.
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Wife's letter to deploying husband strikes a chord with others

Wife's letter to deploying husband strikes a chord with others
By Nancy Montgomery, Stars and Stripes
European edition, Friday, February 5, 2010
Read Jennifer Chaloux's entire letter to her husband here
Jennifer Chaloux, newly wed and deeply in love, didn’t know what to do.

Her husband, Spc. Matthew Chaloux, a Georgia National Guardsman, was deploying to Afghanistan for a year.

Should she try not to cry? Give him a hug, get in the car and just drive off?

It was last spring, and Matthew was in his pre-deployment training at Camp Shelby, Miss. There’d be one final weekend at home, then he’d be gone.

She thought about the absence of the husband it had taken her half a lifetime to find.

"It just kind of hit me: ‘He’s going to be in a country with these terrorists who will stop at nothing,’ " she said. "What was he getting into? It really weighed on my mind.

"I said, I’ve got to say goodbye to my husband, and I don’t know how to do it."

So the former hairdresser sat down and wrote a letter to give him before he deployed. She wanted to put down in words all the things she was feeling.
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http://www.stripes.com/article.asp?section=104&article=67796

Deployments take toll on children of soldiers

Deployments take toll on children of soldiers

By Preston Sparks - The Augusta (Ga.) Chronicle via AP
Posted : Monday Jan 4, 2010 7:47:48 EST

AUGUSTA, Ga. — Marcus Carr is the first to admit it can be a bit depressing.

Both of his parents are deployed overseas in the military — his mom in Iraq, his dad in Korea. Marcus’ parents are divorced, and while his mom is away he has been living with his stepfather in Augusta, helping out with extra chores such as washing dishes, caring for the dog and helping his half-brother with his studies.

“It’s kind of depressing,” he said recently, reflecting on how as a high school senior he has achieved certain milestones that his parents have been unable to enjoy with him. “It really takes a toll on me.”

So does, Marcus added, having to move six times because of military reassignments.

“Friends, it was always hard to make because you were only there for a little time,” he said, adding that he has also had problems with records transfers, sometimes losing credit for classes.

Marcus is among the thousands of children who must cope with the sacrifices that come from having a parent in the military. And amid prolonged wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, a new study suggests deployments are having an effect on military children.
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Deployments take toll on children of soldiers

Soldiers' children are war victims, too

Soldiers' children are war victims, too
By Melissa Fletcher Stoeltje - Express-News

War's effect on mental health
900,000 troops with children have deployed to war since 2001.
Six out of 10 military parents say their children have increased anxiety when a parent is sent to war.
Children of U.S. troops sought outpatient mental-health care 2 million times in 2008, double the number at the start of the Iraq war.
From 2007 to 2008, some 20 percent more children of active duty troops were hospitalized for mental-health care.

Sitting outside a Starbucks on a recent sunny morning, Gabriella Lane, 8, clutches a well-worn blanket. She's a serious, unsmiling little girl with a patriotic red, white and blue barrette in her hair.

The blanket goes everywhere with her, said her mother: It's her security talisman, the comforting fabric she holds onto in an unsure, sometimes frightening world.

At the tender age of 8, Gabriella has already experienced grown-up fears and concerns: Three times she has seen her beloved father, a combat medic, go off to war.

His latest deployment was a yearlong stint in Afghanistan, and Gabriella and her brother, Alvaro, worried every day that the horrible things happening on the news would befall him. On trips to see their doctor at Brooke Army Medical Center, they would see the wounded and limbless soldiers and imagine their dad coming back mutilated or, worse, not coming back at all.

Gabriella took her father's deployment the hardest. Already an anxious child, her stress level "really went off the charts" after her dad left for Afghanistan, said mother Fabiola Lane.

"We could not go out in public, especially crowded places like movies or restaurants," Lane said. "She started sweating and plucking out her hair and her eyebrows. She scratched herself until she brought blood. We could not travel more than an hour or she would vomit. She started coming into my bed at night every half hour, just crying and saying she missed her father."

Gabriella sees a psychiatrist once a week and is on medication for anxiety. She is hardly alone as she struggles to cope with her father's deployment. According to a recent Pentagon study, children of U.S. military troops sought outpatient mental health care 2 million times last year, double the number at the start of the Iraq war. There also was a disturbing upswing in the number of military children hospitalized for mental-health troubles.

Since the 2003 invasion of Iraq, inpatient visits among military children have mushroomed by 50 percent.
read more here
http://www.mysanantonio.com/military/54232692.html

Army’s focus is on stress

There is a great commandment in the military,,,,,don't complain. A female soldier asked if there was anything that was being done to keep couples from being deployed at the same time so that one of them could stay home with their children. Just last week we heard about another female soldier who had already done her time but was called back. She showed up on base with her children because her husband works on the road and there was no one to take care of them. Over and over again, we hear stories about the stress on the families but no one seems to be willing to do very much for them.

President and other politicians usually thank the troops and then thank families but I wonder if anyone really knows what families are expected to go thru. When you marry someone in the military, there are deployments and relocations, so many issues that go along with it other than worrying about them coming back alive. You worry about them being wounded and if the government will do what they are supposed to do without having to fight them the way all too many have had to do before you. Then there are the stresses of being "it" all. Becoming a multi-tasker taking on all of what your deployed spouse does on top of what you already do, but that ends when they come home and want it all back after you've figured out how to do it without them. The list does not seem to end because it doesn't.

It doesn't end when you marry a veteran either. For a lot of the younger service men and women, they are coming into their own and looking forward to starting their own families. For most civilians, they are unaware of what comes with the veteran and all too often, when signs of PTSD show up, all hell breaks and fractures the bond they thought would hold them together. This happened to every generation of veterans and their families. To say that it's a rude awakening would not even come close. It's more like a massive earthquake shaking the foundations of even the strongest relationships. With the right tools, relationships can be rebuilt and some even come out on the other side of darkness stronger than they would have been had they not been tested and tried by all that comes with PTSD.

While it is somewhat of a relief the military are doing things they never did before to address the stress on the families, if they only listen and do nothing with what they've learned, the problem gets bigger and families fall apart. Reports like this are welcome news but I hope they are not more of the same of listening only and not doing.

Army’s focus is on stress

Top enlisted tells troops in Germany about service’s efforts
By Jennifer H. Svan, Stars and Stripes

KAISERSLAUTERN, Germany — When Sgt. Maj. of the Army Kenneth Preston and the military services’ other senior enlisted advisers met with President Barack Obama on Jan. 30, Preston told him his biggest concern in the Army was stress on the force.

Suicide, domestic violence, sexual assault, acts of misconduct, post-traumatic stress disorder are all on the rise — and indicators of the increased pressures faced by soldiers and families, Preston told Obama.

Those "warning lights" again took center stage when Preston spoke to more than 1,000 soldiers Wednesday during a brief stop in Kaiserslautern, on the way home from a military trip to Ukraine.

"The stress on the force is all-encompassing," he said, from preparing to deploy to trying to fit back into the family after a long combat tour.

Preston assured soldiers that the Army was taking steps to mitigate that pressure and reduce the perceived stigma of seeking mental health care. click link for more