The war on terror in Iraq and Afghanistan has seemed to hit the children of U.S. troops the hardest, researchers said on Monday.
According to a new study, children aged 3 to 5 with a parent deployed to one of the two war zones exhibit more behavioral problems such as aggressiveness than similar children in military families without a parent deployed.
“The whole family dynamic changes when one parent is away for a long period,” said Dr. Deborah Frank, one of the researchers.
“And in this case, on top of the usual stresses of separation, even very young children can sense the anxiety that not only is the parent not there but something terrible might happen to them,” Frank said.
More than 2 million U.S. children have suffered through a deployment since the wars began.
Hitting, biting and hyperactivity, “the behaviors parents really notice”, were more frequent when a parent was deployed, said lead author Dr. Molinda Chartrand, an active duty pediatrician in the U.S. Air Force.
The study conducted by a team from Boston Medical Center and Boston University tracked 169 families with preschool-age children enrolled in military child care facilities in 2007 at a large Marine Corps base, which the researchers declined to identify.
Researchers found one third of the children in the study had a parent currently deployed.
Both parents and child care providers assessed behavior, the researchers wrote in Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine.
Last year, a study of 1,800 Army families worldwide found reports of child abuse and neglect were 42 percent higher during times when the soldier-parent was deployed.
Since the war began in Afghanistan seven years ago and Iraq more than five years ago, “this is the first time any data have been published on these little kids,” said Chartrand.
“They deal with a lot of separation and uprooting as a matter of course.”
Preschoolers with a parent away at war were more likely to show aggression than other young children in military families.
About 1 in 5 of the older preschoolers with a parent at war displayed troubling emotional or behavioral signs.
While older preschoolers had trouble, deployment had the opposite effect on children younger than three.
“We have to realize that it’s not just the people on the field of battle who are suffering from these wars but their families and their young children,” Frank said.
The United States has 152,000 troops in Iraq and 31,000 in Afghanistan.
Army soldiers are deployed for at least a year at a time and Marines for seven months at a time. Many have been deployed repeatedly.
“It’s the multiple deployments that are really starting to get to kids,” said Joyce Raezer, executive director of the National Military Family Association, which provides resources and support to spouses and children of military personnel.
“Maybe a family makes it through the first deployment fairly well, but they don’t fully recover from the first deployment before that service member is into the second or third or whatever deployment. How do you measure that cumulative effect?” Raezer said.
Children with existing medical conditions like autism and attention deficit disorder were excluded from the study.
That made the results especially notable to Michelle Kelley, a psychology professor at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virgina.
“You’re pulling out the mom’s depressive symptoms and her stress so the difference in the kids is above and independent of that,” Kelley said. “If these kids are having difficulty, it’s pretty likely that other kids are having difficulty as well.”
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Image Caption: While the ribbon is cut at the Fort Myer Child Development Center, twin brother and sister Hunter and Sienna Bingham, 3, wait patiently for their playground to become available again while a Soldiers Media Center Soldier gets footage of the historic event. Courtesy Adam Skoczylas, US Army
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