War=deployment

When I think of war, I immediately think of deployment.  My boyfriend is in the National Guard and has done two 12 month deployments overseas.  His first was a combat mission of 6 months in Iraq and 6 months in Afghanistan and then he did a one-year peacekeeping mission in Egypt (he was there before, during and after the protests broke out in Cairo and in other places in Egypt).  We do not have children, but when he deployed to Egypt, I became close with a group of women who husbands are in the Guard too and they have children of all ages.  I learned through their experiences about what their children were going through, so those are what I will share with you.  One mother, who had a child in high school, talked about how her son struggled with school work and became defiant towards her when her husband first left.  Her husband was the one who did the disciplining, so she had to take a more active role in learning how to do that in his absence and find a way to communicate with her son to help him in school.  Another mother talked about how her children would feel resentful at times towards her husband and not want to talk to him on skype because he was missing certain things in their life.  Another had an almost one year old, so he missed the first steps and first birthday of his child and that extremely important bonding time with his little guy.  All of these women are great mothers and strong women and they were able to cope in many ways, which lead to their children being able to cope as well.    They made new routines for themselves, got themselves and their children involved in positive activities to make the time go faster, gained support from friends and family members, and kept up an almost daily connection with their husbands, so they were able to communicate and keep them up to date on what was going on at home.  All of these were positive for the spouses, which directly relates to being positive for the child.  Children can easily pick up on the mood and feelings of those around them and they are easily influenced by the environment they are surrounded with.
    For my full-time job, I work at an Army installation, so I have military children and I also had a child of one of the guys that deployed with my boyfriend to Egypt, so I saw first hand how things affected him.  He had a very hard time potty training, partially because mom was busy working, going to school and trying to raise him on her own, so we really had to try some different things to get him motivated and wanting to continue to potty train.  There were times when he would be playing and all of a sudden just get sad and go sit in his cubby.  I would sit by him and ask what was wrong and he would say, "I miss my daddy."  Usually I would have him make a picture or something else that we could send to dad and that really seemed to help.  He was also a very restless sleeper and I always felt like it was due to the stress of his mom's busy life and dad being gone.  Children can pick up on that stress and I felt like he displayed that in his sleeping patterns.
   Even though we are ending one war, we are still fighting in another in Afghanistan and there are many children that have moms and dads over there and they are affected by this everyday. There are many resources out there that can help caregivers that have children with deployed parents.  Your local VA office will have information and so will Army Community Services on your local army installations, if you're near one.  A lot of the websites I have are specific to Illinois National Guard families, but one website everyone can look at is militaryonesource.com (lots of free goodies).