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FORT HOOD, Texas - We’ve heard the numbers: more than 6,000 American lives lost and trillions of dollars spent on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. These metrics, however, do not capture the entire cost of the last 12 years of conflict. Many lesser-understood costs could negatively impact Americans for generations to come.
In an effort to understand and reduce one of those costs, the Department of Defense has teamed up with civilian academia. The Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Health Affairs is funding research conducted by the University of Houston, the University of Central Florida, and the University of Hawaii to examine the effects of deployment stress on children.
Dr. Deborah Beidel, a professor of psychology at the University of Central Florida and a principal researcher in this project, wants to better understand the impact of parent-child separations, particularly military deployments.
“We want to provide programs that are useful and that are modular and appropriate to the developmental level of the child,” said Beidel.
By using objective measurements that have not been examined in this way before, Beidel hopes to be able to show parents what they can expect as a result of a separation before it actually happens.
According to Beidel, other research projects have been based on a questionnaire completed by the non-deploying spouse that examined child stress strictly through the child’s behaviors. This method could yield results that are impacted by the stress level of the person questioned; the non-deployed spouse who could be experiencing his or her own stress and worrying about the same in the child.
This research seeks to understand not just how children act, but how they feel and function by examining objective, neurobiological measures of stress – sleep patterns and the stress hormone cortisol that is found in saliva.
“There is a well know fact that little boys often deny emotional distress. They were taught very young that ‘big boys don’t cry,’” said Beidel. “Your sleep and ‘spit’ don’t lie. You can’t make them look better or worse.”
To date, 24 families from Fort Hood have enrolled in the program, according to Dr. Candice Alfano, director of the Sleep and Anxiety Center of Houston at the University of Houston and another principal researcher in the project. Approximately 150 families have enrolled across the country, and the goal is to enroll 600 families from all branches of the military before the project ends.
“All of the branches work together during operations and joint missions so we want to make sure that all children are represented in our results,” said Alfano.
To add depth to the research, there are five groups of families being recruited for the study, including: 1) military families with someone currently deployed, 2) military families with no one deployed at the time, 3) civilian families going through a recent divorce or separation, 4) civilian families in which a parent leaves home for extended periods of time for work, and 5) civilian families not experiencing separation.
These groups and the biological measures used will allow researchers to identify the impact of parental military deployment on children’s mental health and well-being like never before. This will allow both military and civilian behavioral health specialists to better design programs that will help the current generation of children of deployed service members as well as future war-generation children.
Though this research is funded by the DOD and examines the impact of deployments on military children, the benefit will be far more extensive.
“We are looking at measures of resilience, not just negative outcomes,” said Beidel. “Military families are resilient and no one has attempted to assess resilience and how that might help families cope with deployment and how that might be helpful for civilian families who might experience parental separation.”
For participants from Fort Hood, researchers from the University of Houston will visit the family in their home to ask the participants a series of questions and explain the study. After the interview, children wear a wrist watch-type device for one week that measures sleep. Children will also spit into a small vial each morning. Researchers return later to collect the device and the vials. Families are compensated $100 for their time and effort.
“These families have been most gracious and open in sharing their stories with us, good and bad,” said Alfano. “We are so honored to be able to do this project.”
Families in the southeastern United States who are interested in participating can visit www.ucfmilitaryfamilies.org or call 407-823-1063.
| Date Taken: | 08.06.2014 |
| Date Posted: | 08.06.2014 14:03 |
| Story ID: | 138472 |
| Location: | FORT HOOD, TX, US |
| Hometown: | CORPUS CHRISTI, TX, US |
| Hometown: | FORT CAVAZOS, TX, US |
| Hometown: | HOUSTON, TX, US |
| Hometown: | KILLEEN, TX, US |
| Hometown: | ORLANDO, FL, US |
| Web Views: | 171 |
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This work, DoD and civilian academics team up to combat child stress, by MAJ Steven Miller, identified by DVIDS, must comply with the restrictions shown on https://www.dvidshub.net/about/copyright.
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