Coping with Stress: Supporting the Needs of Military Families and Their Children

Family dynamics and the individual differences of each family member can impact their stress. For families in the military, stress occurs regularly due to factors such a reassignments, deployments, and the frequency of changes. For some families, the stress that occurs over time helps family members to develop resiliency. Learning to cope with stress can teach skills in adapting to stressful lifestyle factors (e.g., mobility and relocation). Members of many military families develop these skills, while other families need a strong supportive network to facilitate their adjustment to military lifestyle stress. This is a review of the literature on the issues of how families and their children cope with and adapt to the stress of the military lifestyle. Suggestion are given for how families and school can work together to support children in military families to adapt to the military lifestyle. These suggestions can be applied to other types of transient families.