Military life presents families with many unique benefits, but also multiple challenges. As military service members, parents can face issues related to deployment, training, moves and on the job demands, and their spouses and children can face challenges that impact their health and well-being, affect military family readiness and can influence future choices around military service for military connected children.
Children and parents impact each other’s health and well-being. Understanding the ways that family members impact each other and the family unit overall is a crucial foundation to any effort to support and strengthen military families and increase well-being and readiness.
The Division of Military Child and Family Research seeks to increase understanding of how military life impacts children and families and to foster innovative approaches to providing system level support to improve healthcare to children and families. We seek to identify child and family risk and protective factors, explore how the military health system can strengthen military family and child well-being, and family and develop support system wide initiatives to support military connected children and families. The goals of the Division of Military Child and Family Research are to:
- explore the impact of military life on children and families,
- identify risk factors and times of higher risk,
- identify factors associated with child and family resilience, and
- develop opportunities to promote resilience in military children and families
- support innovative approaches to strengthen and care for military connected children
- act as a hub for information sharing and provider education to multiply the impact of successful approaches to caring for children and families