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...and a fabulous example of positive support.
And that doesn't always happen, but what a lucky young woman
to have this teacher that could do that.
Okay, so next slide, please.
Meaning Making. So how do you make sense of what's happening?
And that was part of how we formed the question for this young person.
"...my brother was too young."
"He was just about...one, around that age, and so my dad really all he said was,
"'I'm leaving it up to you, you need to...take care of your mother and your brother.'"
"I know he had that respect, but I didn't know he would ever drop it on me,
"which kind of gave me that good, but bad feeling like yippee, oh, crap."
[laughter]
So we're looking at what sense do they make out of what's given to them.
The next one says, "I wouldn't say I felt mad, but it's kind of confusing
"about why he would want to go put himself in that position." Different story.
Last one. "When my dad was deployed, I felt the same as I always do."
"Once you...if you're born into the military, you get used to it."
Different stories that they're telling themselves.
Next slide.
So Implications for Families. So what does this mean for parents?
I'm going to catch up with myself here.
One piece is that we've got to encourage families,
and I know there are lots of spouses and family members here.
We've got to talk about this stuff. We have to be able to make explicit the stuff that's implicit.
We have to say, "Here's how things are going to change."
"Here's how things are going to stay the same."
"Yes, it's scary. This is how it goes."
The second point is to maintain consistent expectations,
family patterns, activities, and rituals.
We do best as organisms with predictability, and young people are no different.
So I can't tell you the number of young people that said,
"Well, when my whole family was together,
"we would sit down and have dinner every night."
"But now that my parent is deployed, we just grab our plate and go sit in front of the TV."
So they don't have to be the same rituals, but there needs to be some notion
of consistency for everybody to be successful.
The next one, access a support system for parents and youth.
It could be a formal program but with the intent of making those informal connections.
In times of deployment, people want to feel seen.
That's what people want anyway,
and in these times of deployment when your major attachment system is gone,
either because your spouse is gone or your parent is gone,
the sense of invisibility can be pretty great.
And so thinking about how to leverage these programs to get people to feel connected,
not just, "Here's a resource, here's a website," but, "Here's somebody you can talk to
"that gets what you're going through." Important for parents and for kids.
Next, recognize indicators of adjustment.
Parents need to have an eye out for what does it look like in boys and girls.
What's normal, not normal, for my kid?
And remind youth that worry and distraction are normal.
They might think there's something wrong with them if they can't focus on their school work.
They might think that they're letting Dad down or Mom down
because Mom and Dad said, "Study hard."
"That's your job while I'm gone is get good grades."
And if they can't do that, they might feel like they've really let them down.
Recognize the impact of absence.
Recognize that being gone as a parent or as a spouse is difficult,
and cut yourself some slack and cut the kids some slack. Be gentle.
This is a hard time.
And then finally, learn and model appropriate strategies for self care and coping.
We can't be good caretakers to other people if we don't take care of ourselves.
And I know we say that, but then this is exactly the crowd that doesn't do that.
Right? [chuckles]
So find those resources, find what works for you so that you can help parents
pass that on to their kids.
There's a couple of good resources, and I promise that I wasn't paid to say this,
but when I looked in the bag, there's the "ScreamFree Parenting,"
which is one example of a great way to get to know yourself
and what stories as parents we're telling ourselves about what's going on
so that we're not so reactive to our kids.
Another great resource is "Parenting from the Inside Out,"
which really, again, helps us to focus on, "We've got to get our own house in order
"before we can be a resource for our kids."
So those are my Implications.
Next slide.
Tons of resources. I know you can't read these.
If you go to my website through Virginia Tech,
most of this stuff is available as a PDF that you can just download,
or I would be happy to give you different reports and papers that we've done.
Thank you, and thanks again for your work.
[applause]
[Martinson] Thank you, Dr. Huebner.
And now please welcome Dr. MacDermid Wadsworth.
[applause]
Good morning. >>[audience] Good morning.
I want to echo Angela's thanks to all of you for your service.
Just so that I can get to know you a little bit,
how many of you are parents in a family that has experienced a deployment?
And how many of any of you here are Family Readiness Group leaders
or Key Volunteers or Key Spouses?
Thank you so much for your service and your leadership.
I'm honored to be among you.
And I wouldn't presume to try to teach you anything,
but I can try to share with you information about resources
that hopefully are available to you today.
I don't have slides.
I know that you're going to spend a lot of time today looking at slides,
so I thought I would just let you look at me. [laughter]
Also, because I don't have slides, you don't know how to reach me.
I have a very easy email address, just my first name (shelley@purdue.edu)--
Purdue like the university, not the chicken. [laughter]
And I'd be happy to send you any information that you would like.
I'm going to try to focus my remarks on young children today--preschool children.
And my goal is to try to give you some information that you can use
hopefully in your own lives and also with the families that you are working so hard to serve
as they complete their military service.
We know that all parents worry about their children,
and we know that during this war, parents and military leaders
have really worried about how these long separations are affecting their children
and what their children's long-term prospects will be.
There's no doubt that deployment is challenging,
and children may struggle in a variety of ways.
And we don't know yet all of the long-term consequences.
But I do want to let you know that we do have evidence
from many other challenging circumstances for children throughout history.
We do have some good hints about some things.
And really, children have experienced some awful things in the past and today.
We have studies from orphanages where children were left alone
and completely neglected for long periods of time.
We have information from natural disasters
where every piece of infrastructure around them
that a child knew has been destroyed, and children have to cope in that circumstance.
We have information today from child soldiers who are pressed into service
around the world and made to perform horrific acts
that we would be loath to ask adult soldiers to perform.
And there is information about these children and what happens to them.
And by comparison, some of our military kids look pretty privileged.
Nonetheless, we do learn some things about resilience,
and I think the most important point that we always need to keep in mind
is that the most common response that humans exhibit to challenge
is resilience.
Humans are not, in most cases, victims or victimized
or overwhelmed or made unable to function.
The modal response, the most common response, is resilience.
And it's important for us to remember that so that we don't think of ourselves
as people who don't have the wherewithal to respond and survive and thrive.
We do, though, also, as you've heard this morning,
have mounting evidence that there is a substantial minority of military children
who experience measurable negative consequences
in response to the challenges of deployment.
We see elevated anxiety, we see reduced school achievement scores,
and perhaps even more consequential for children is the behavior of others.
We see substantial increases in some groups of child maltreatment,
particularly neglect.
So deployment is a challenging time for children, as is reintegration,
and they also can be risky times for children.
But it's important to remember that it's a substantial minority of children,
not most children.
In all of the studies that we know of about children in horrible circumstances,
the thing that comes up over and over again that is key for children
is a caring adult who is available and responsive to the child.
That adult often is a parent, but not always.
That adult may be a single adult or it may be multiple adults.
But adults are hugely important in the lives of children, and they always are.
No matter what the public press tries to tell you about peers supplant parents,
don't believe them.
There's very little evidence that peers ever become more important than parents.
Peers certainly become more important in adolescence
but not more important than parents.
And of course with young children, with preschool children,
parents are enormously important.
Kids, we know, can tolerate risks.
Kids can survive challenges.
When we start to see trouble is when kids are faced with too many risks.
And risks don't just accumulate in a linear fashion.
So kids may do fine with one risk factor or two or three,
but all of a sudden, the negative consequences start to mount up much more quickly,
so the difference between four risks and six risks is bigger
than the difference between one and three.
So children are, in most cases, resilient, but they're not resilient to everything,
and they're not resilient to everything all at the same time.
So as challenges start to mount, it's important to be attentive
to the configuration of risks that children are experiencing.
I'd like to tell you about three programs that are available to you.
Two are available to all of you now at any time.
One is available only in Indiana right now.
But I'd like to tell you what they are and why I think they are useful to you.
We have been involved with each of these programs in different ways.
The first I'd like to mention is the Talk, Listen, Connect program,
which is the Sesame Workshop initiative that I'm sure all of you are familiar with.
I believe you have copies of one of the DVDs in your bags,
and they're available at the tables outside.
The institute that I direct, the Military Family Research Institute,
was the evaluator for Talk, Listen, Connect 2,
which is the two modules that focused on multiple deployments
and also people who have experienced wounds and injuries.
And the evaluation data looked good, even though it's a modest intervention--
you know--watching a DVD with your child.
That's a pretty short-term kind of intervention.
So the findings are modest, but there's something that's very, very important
about what Talk, Listen, Connect does that I think can be helpful to all of us
because what do we do when a young child expresses a strong negative emotion?
We try to reassure them.
We say, "Oh, no. It's not so bad." Or, "It'll be better tomorrow."
Or, "Oh, you're not really angry at your dad."
And all of those things are well-meaning efforts to protect our children.
We feel that it's our job to protect them from negative experiences.
But in fact, what those responses do is silence children.
It tells them that we're uncomfortable with their negative emotions,
that we're not really wanting to discuss that with them.
But what children need very much is a safe place
to learn how to deal with negative emotions.
They don't understand what they're feeling always.
They can't verbalize it in a way that they can process it the way that we can.
All that they know is they feel upset and unsettled and unhappy,
and they don't know what to do about it.
So I think what the Talk, Listen, Connect materials do
is model for parents a way to deal with their children's negative emotions
in a way that does not silence the children but also helps to comfort the children.
And that's a really tricky parenting skill
that lots of parents don't know what to do
because you have that moment of panic, "Oh, no! My child is angry at his or her father,
"and I don't want that to be, or her mother. How do I help?"
And so I think these materials are very helpful for that reason,
and I think parents can feel supported, which they do--
our evidence shows that they do feel supported--
but they can also learn something that's extremely valuable
for young children.
One program that I'll mention that's for older children
is one that we've developed in collaboration with the Indiana National Guard.
And the one reason that I think it's useful is that Guard kids and Reserve kids in our state
live in onesies and twosies.
They don't live on installations or near installations.
They don't live in big military communities.
And this program provides an opportunity for kids to get together 60 days post return
and to be with kids who have experienced the same thing
and to get some tools that they can use in their homes and in their communities
to deal with their feelings about separation and reunion.
We call that program Passport Toward Success,
and I'd be happy to give you more information.
Or if there are other states that are interested, I'm happy to share it.
The last thing that I'll mention is a program that may be coming to an installation near you.
It's coming to 65 installations over the next couple of years.
It was created by ZERO TO THREE.
It's called Coming Together Around Military Families.
That program is now in Phase 2.
We were the evaluator for Phase 1.
Coming Together Around Military Families focuses on people
who work with young military children,
and the goal of the program is to help those people be better prepared
to work with parents of young military kids--very young kids aged zero to three.
What a surprise given the name of the sponsoring organization.
The reason I think this program is important
is that what the people who go through it say
is that they have learned how to understand better the experiences
of military families with young kids, and they feel better able to respond to those children.
So that program, when it comes to your installation,
has the opportunity to improve the quality of the environment
for children younger than three.
I'd like to close with a few final thoughts.
One, young children who are distressed
display that distress in all kinds of unpredictable ways.
They don't know how to say, "Well, I'm irritated but I'm not angry."
Or, "I'm upset but it's not too serious." They don't know how to do that.
They don't know how to calibrate or regulate
or talk about their emotions in a calibrated way.
So it shows up in all kinds of unexpected ways,
and Angela's advice to pay attention to what's normal for your child is very smart.
Parents who are doing well, we have learned over and over and over again,
are much more likely to have children who are doing well.
So it is no sin to take care of yourself as a way of trying to take care of your children.
Sacrificing yourself for your children can backfire.
Finally, I want to just say a couple of things about resilience.
Resilience is a very popular concept these days.
We've got lots of information about resilience,
but it is very important to remember resilience is not immunity from distress.
Just because somebody has taken a resilience class
doesn't mean that they're going to be vaccinated against being upset
when a deployment comes along.
It's just not true.
Resilience also has a biological component,
and so it's not reasonable to think that every single person can be made resilient somehow.
We can support resilience, we can help people learn relevant skills,
but everyone is different, and everyone has a different history,
and we shouldn't expect that everyone should be able to be made resilient.
And we won't know until adversity occurs whether someone really is resilient.
There's no test that you can take that I know of that will say,
"Oh, yes. You're ready. Let it come."
All we can make right now is guesses.
So what can you do to help young military children?
What are the three or four things that you can do?
Number one, model good problem solving for your children.
They learn what they watch.
If you want them to learn how to solve problems and confront challenging situations,
then you need to do it in a calm, responsive, and competent way.
Children, as you know, need a good balance of warmth and control.
They need limits. You've all heard that.
But they also need lots of involvement and lots of responsiveness.
That doesn't mean giving them everything they want;
it means convincing them that you're their biggest fan, even when they mess up
and you're going to punish them for it.
If you can manage that trick, you are much more likely to have a child
who survives and thrives.
And modeling a calm, confident approach in response to adversity
shows your children how to be calm and confident in the face of adversity.
It doesn't mean denying it, it doesn't mean pretending that it's not there,
but it does show that you approach these things with an attitude of,
"I can figure out a way to do this. Even if I need to get help to deal with it, I'll do that."
And as you do that, then your children learn that.
And who knows? Maybe our servicemembers too will feel a little more comfortable
seeking help when they need it as well.
So thank you very much for your kind attention,
and I wish you the best at your meeting.
[applause]
[Martinson] Thank you, Dr. MacDermid Wadsworth.
And next we will hear from Ms. Young. Please welcome her.
[applause]
Good morning. >>[audience] Good morning.
My guess is that, like me, many of you were wondering
where my presentation fit in to all of this research that's been shared up here.
I hope for you, like for me, the light went on during the course of their presentations
is that what I'm going to talk about is a tool that has been put into place
to address some of the issues that our researchers
have talked to you about this morning.
I think the program I'm going to talk about truly addresses
that whole idea of positive adolescence and developing those positive skills
that help us through adolescence.
I also think this program is going to address that whole issue of working with schools
and communities to help our young people survive and do well and thrive
during repeat deployments and separations from parents.
But more importantly, I think it's going to give them an opportunity and a tool
to express how they're feeling about the situation.
So this morning my job is to introduce you briefly to a program
that the Army Reserve is using to help our children develop
those positive adolescent skills, and that program is called A Backpack Journalist.
I hope to talk to you a little bit about the rationale or the whys
and how we're using the Backpack Journalist program with Army Reserve youth
and, more importantly, to have them talk to you in their own words
about their experience with A Backpack Journalist.
So first of all, what is A Backpack Journalist?
It's very difficult to describe unless you've been there.
I describe it as a laboratory made up of professional journalists,
photographers, songwriters, editors, and publishers
who have developed what I refer to as a youth-centric environment
where they teach children their craft.
During the course of A Backpack Journalist experience,
we have a journalist by the name of David Knight who teaches our children to,
what he refers to as, "observate."
He also teaches them how to write and journal a story
where the reader can taste, feel, and smell the experience that they're writing about.
During the course of their training, they also will hear from a photographer
about how important it is to use light, shadowing,
how important the use of and the focus on a hand or a face
can show you the character of a person.
We also have a person who is a songwriter who can teach them
about how to use their own personal experience to develop lyrics
and take those lyrics into a studio and develop an original song.
"Pretty in Pink" is one of the songs that was developed in one of our events.
They also have the opportunity to spend time with a cartoonist
who can tell them and teach them about how to use a real picture
and exaggerate it to the point where it is now a cartoon that tells a story.
We have not used all of these experiences that are possible through A Backpack Journalist.
We have primarily focused on photojournalism,
we've focused on songwriting,
we've done some poetry, and we do now have two young people
who are in the Backpack Journalist intern program.
Next slide. Why did we get involved with A Backpack Journalist?
For obvious reasons, as some of the researchers up here have talked about,
it's youth skill development.
That's something that the Army Reserve Child, Youth and School program
has been about all along.
We already have a Youth Leadership Education and Development program
where we bring youth in to develop skills.
But more importantly, when we looked at A Backpack Journalist program,
it focused in on three very critical and important tools
that we wanted our young people to learn.
One is technology and how to use technology
and how to be on the cutting edge of technology
because we know that's going to be the secret to their success in the future.
Number two, it teaches them communication skills,
and we know also that being able to communicate and communicate effectively
will be a tool that will contribute to their academic success
and their success as human beings.
So that's one of the primary reasons
we decided to get involved with Backpack Journalist.
Obviously, one of the reasons we wanted to look at A Backpack Journalist
was one of the things they talked about in the RAND Study.
One of the things that came out of the RAND Study
is that they were seeing that our teenagers or our adolescents
were having very significant negative impacts as a result of parental separation
and repeat deployments.
So this was an opportunity for us to bring some of those youth into one of our programs
and have them have the benefit of this program
and give them a voice, a medium through which they could talk about their experiences
of being a child of a deployed person.
We also wanted to get involved with A Backpack Journalist
because of the potential for interservice and intercommunity kinds of activities,
that we could work with other people to help our kids hone these skills
once they left the training.
We could work with schools, we could work with community youth programs,
we could work with other programs--military programs like Operation Military Kids,
4-H programs, Boys & Girls Clubs of America, and other community programs.
And more importantly, these are the kinds of things that we could do
out in geographically dispersed areas where our Army Reserve families reside.
But the final one is that this, we believe, was appropriate to help our children
stay connected with their deployed parent
and other youth who are experiencing the same type of experience.
It was also a way for them to express their feelings,
hear other people's feelings about what this deployment experience was about,
and of course we wanted to hopefully reinforce some of the skills
and highlight those resiliency skills because many of our children,
as our last speaker talked about, are in fact resilient.
Sometimes we have to point out to them all those skills that they have
and help them develop and further use those skills to survive.
And then finally, one of the reasons we wanted to get involved with A Backpack Journalist
is that we saw it as a force multiplier or a pay it forward opportunity.
When we offered it to the original group,
one of the requirements for the original group who went through the training
is that they had to go back to their command and/or their unit
and do at least two activities where they shared their experience
with other adolescents and youth in their unit.
So how has the Army Reserve used A Backpack Journalist?
Our first opportunity to use A Backpack Journalist was through
our Army Reserve Teen Panel back in April.
In this experience, our Army Teen Panel members
participated in all of the programs or learned about all of the programs
that the Backpack Journalist program has to offer,
and then they were afforded the opportunity to choose the specialty
that they wanted to focus in on, whether it was songwriting,
whether it was photography, whether it was journalism,
or we had some who focused in on cartooning.
I would say to you that one of the most important things for me
that came out of that original participation was a young lady who brought in photos.
They were encouraged to bring in photos if they wanted to get involved with videos,
and she brought in photos of a friend of hers, a 17-year-old adolescent friend.
She took those photos, wrote the script, and produced a video to talk about--