Center on Children and Families

Future of Children

Military Families, Vol. 23, no. 2

Today’s military children and families experience unique hardships. They move around the country and the world repeatedly, and they must therefore adjust to new living environments, schools, and peer groups much more often than other children and families do. They live through repeated cycles of stressful separation and reunion. And they must cope with the possibility, and sometimes the reality, that a parent will die in combat or come home with serious and permanent health problems and disabilities.

Much of the research about military children examines these and other stressful experiences, or the difficulties that these sources of stress purportedly cause (for example, poor academic performance, depression, or behavioral problems). Though we certainly need to understand military life’s negative effects on children, such research tells neither the complete story nor what is perhaps the more important story. In large part, researchers have yet to examine military children’s strengths, how these strengths can sustain them through adversity, or how their own strengths interact and develop with the strengths of their military families and the communities where they live. Moreover, we have yet to fully identify and assess the resources for positive development that exist in these children’s schools, in the military, and in their civilian communities. In short, the existing research offers only a rudimentary depiction of military children and their families across their respective life courses, and certainly not a representative one.

Past Editions of The Future of Children

Work and Family (Vol. 21, No.2)

Immigrant Children (Vol. 21, no. 1)