Wartime Deployment and Military Children: Applying Prevention Science to Enhance Family Resilience

During wartime, military families and children make extraordinary sacrifices for their country. This chapter reviews the impact of wartime deployments and parental combat-related mental health problems on military children, as well as risk and protective factors that may serve to guide preventive interventions for military families facing multiple deployments, combat operational stress, and psychological injuries. Using a public health prevention approach, we describe the adaptation of evidence-based interventions to support psychological health in military families. This adaptation is FOCUS (Families OverComing Under Stress), a family-centered preventive intervention designed to enhance the strengths of family members, manage deployment-related stressors and reminders, and maintain positive family growth and psychological adjustment throughout the stages of deployment. Supported by the U.S. Bureau of Navy Medicine and Surgery (BUMED), military leadership, community providers, and families, this intervention has been implemented through a large-scale service demonstration project to support military families.