Abstract
Multiple adjustment difficulties have been associated with children's exposure to recent parental wartime military deployments, but long-term consequences have not yet been systematically studied. This investigation will assess direct and indirect relationships between exposures to parental deployments early in life and later youth adjustment. Parents' psychological health and family processes will be examined as mediators, and parents' and children's vulnerability and support will be examined as moderators. Archival data will be combined with new data gathered from two children and up to two parents in families where children will be aged 11 to 16 at the first data collection and will have experienced at least one parental deployment, for at least one child prior to age 6. Data are being gathered via telephone interviews and web-based surveys conducted twice one year apart. Outcomes are indicators of children's social-emotional development, behavior, and academic performance. Notable features of this study include oversampling of female service members, inclusion of siblings, and inclusion of families of both veterans and currently serving members. This study has potentially important implications for schools, community organizations and health care providers serving current and future cohorts of military and veteran families.
Copyright: This is an open access article, free of all copyright, and may be freely reproduced, distributed, transmitted, modified, built upon, or otherwise used by anyone for any lawful purpose. The work is made available under the Creative Commons CC0 public domain dedication.
MeSH terms
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Adolescent
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Child
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Emotions
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Fathers* / psychology
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Female
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Humans
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Male
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Military Personnel*
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Mothers / psychology
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Parents / psychology
Grants and funding
This study is funded by the organizations listed below. The funders had no role in study design, data collection or analyses, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (R01 HD091373-01; PI: SMW, Co-I: PL, SC, SW, VS, DT), Army Medical Research & Materiel Command (W81XWH-21-2-0005, PI: SMW, Co-I: SC, LK, PL, VS, DT), Lilly Endowment (2019-1354, PI: SMW). FUNDING SOURCE #1 Grant Number: 11000764 Title: Effects During Adolescence of Early Childhood Exposure to Parental Wartime Deployment PI: Shelley MacDermid Wadsworth Project Period: 09/15/2018 to 06/30/2020 Sponsor Name: Phs-Nih Nat Inst Of Child Hlth,Human Dev Sponsor Award No.: 1R01HD091373-01A1 Grant Type: Fed – DHHS Homepage | NICHD - Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (nih.gov) FUNDING SOURCE #2: Grant Number: 13001027 Title: Long-term consequences of mothers' and fathers' wartime deployments PI: Shelley MacDermid Wadsworth Project Period: 09/30/2021 to 09/29/2025 Sponsor Name: Army Medical Research & Material Command Sponsor Award No.: W81XWH-21-2-0005 Grant Type: Fed - Dept. of Defense Military Operational Medicine Research Program (health.mil) FUNDING SOURCE #3: Grant number: 2019-1354 Title: Innovating, engaging, and catalyzing to support military and veteran families. PI: Shelley MacDermid Wadsworth Project Period: 2019-2023 Sponsor Name: Lilly Endowment, Inc. URL:
www.lei.org.