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Military teens stressed out by deployments
The recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have brought a new level of attention to the stress faced not just by those in combat, but by the children and families waiting for them at home.
A new study published in The Journal of Pediatrics focuses on the anxiety teenagers experience when a family member deploys.
The research used a scale to measure symptoms of anxiety recorded by researchers in interviews with teens and their parents, and found a link between the length of time a parent had been deployed in the previous three years and the amount of social, emotional and academic difficulty their teen and preteen children were having.
According to the researchers, the data is unique. Other studies tended to focus on younger children, but the research presented was based on more than 1,500 computer assisted telephone interviews with military children between the ages of 11 and 17 years old, and their parent or caregiver.
Beyond concern for their absent parent, teen and pre-teens reported deployment-related stressors such as bearing greater household responsibility, missing activities because the sole parent couldn’t take them, and dealing with the mood swings of the at-home parent. And the return of the deployed parent, while typically a source of relief, brought anxiety of its own. Respondents indicated worry about readjusting to returning parents, and worry about the parent’s next deployment.
Girls had more problems with the return of the deployed parent, and reported more concern about the parent deploying again, and also about the emotional well-being of other family members.
The mental health of the non-military parent also impacted the degree of difficulty faced by the children. The worse off the parent, the worse off the children, based on symptoms of anxiety.
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