Helping Your Children Cope Through the Deployment of a Parent

For children, the deployment of a parent is much different than it is for the spouse. We, as adults, understand why our spouse must leave us. Children, on the other hand, have a more difficult time understanding why their parent is just not there any more. It becomes our responsibility as the remaining parent to ensure that our children know why they are gone and to help them through the deployment.

Like adults, children can express their feelings about the deployment of a parent in many different ways. These expressions can range all the way from sadness and anger, to showing no emotion at all. In this article I have organized a few tips for helping your children deal with the separation.

The most important thing, and I cannot stress this enough, is to keep your spouse a part of the family while they are gone. One very easy way to do this is to have pictures of your spouse all over the house. During our first deployment our daughter was only five months old when my husband left. I would take down the 8x10 picture and show it to her, we would practice saying "daddy" and give the picture kisses.

One of a soldiers worst fears has got to be that their small child will not know them when they get home. We cured this fear with home videos. The videos allowed my children to associate daddy's face with his voice. We would also make videos, to include daddy in our daily or special events.

When my husband came home he saw his five month old had turned into an 18 month toddler. She knew immediately who he was and the re-integration for them went smoothly.

Older children may be a bit more of a challenge for you. As a child grows older they develop many layers of emotion. Some children may feel that their parent deserted them, they may become depressed or angry about this. In some cases your child may try to take advantage of the other parents' absence.