Active Duty Military Children: A Case Study

When you ask a person to describe an American soldier they will most likely talk about the soldier’s sacrifices and contributions to their country, but rarely do they talk about the sacrifices of the families of those soldiers. These sacrifices can impact military children, especially in aspects of their social skills. A child’s social skills can be significantly burdened by an absent parent, in addition to the inevitable possibility of moving due to deployments, training, and work. Based on a record of 560,020 active duty members with children under the age of 20 (DoD, 2014, p153), and 59.4% of those children were eight years of age or younger (DoD, 2014, p.168), you can assume that a majority of active duty military children were born into the military lifestyle and forced to cope and adapt, essentially contracted into an inconvenient situation as much as the Soldier was. To fully understand the impact the military lifestyle has on an “army brat” you have to understand how a child’s brain works in its first developmental stages. …show more content…
What factors affect their social skills and what efforts are being made to prevent a child from isolating themselves from society? In these early stages, it is important that the child’s parents are present so their children can rely on them and they can learn to trust them. During the early stages, children are primarily dependent on their caregivers for emotional and instrumental support (Mogil, 2015). “Early childhood represents a sensitive developmental period for emotional and behavioral regulation capacities, as a child’s ability to manage emotions requires […] parental support from birth through the preschool years, when children are increasingly aware of their