Growing Up in Military Families: An Exploration of the Relationship Between Parental Military Career, Parenting and Child Developmental Outcomes

Military families, where one or both partners are serving in the armed forces, face a range of unique challenges. Research on military families has received reinvigorated attention over the past decades, in light of current war conflicts and concerns about the impacts of military service, transition demands, and visible and nonvisible war injuries, on military and veterans themselves, and their family members, including children.
Theoretical perspectives suggest that the military family life evolves around the “cycle of deployment” and its stages of predeployment, deployment, post-deployment/reintegration and re-deployment, each bringing different challenges for military family members, including children. Stressors specific to military families include: repeat and often unpredictable parental separation during deployment; additional stress of left-at home parent and family; deployed parent injury and/or death; and reintegration stress, including war-related trauma of the returning parent.
The current study will explore the relationships between parental military career, parenting and developmental outcomes, via secondary data analyses on a sub-sample of children from the Millennium Cohort Study, whose parent(s) were members of the armed forces. The results will be discussed in the context of advancing theoretical perspectives of understanding how cultural and structural features of military family life affect children, parenting and family relationships.