When a Parent Is Injured or Killed in Combat

Abstract

When a service member is injured or dies in a combat zone, the consequences for his or her family can be profound and long-lasting. Visible, physical battlefield injuries often require families to adapt to long and stressful rounds of treatment and rehabilitation, and they can leave the service member with permanent disabilities that mean new roles for everyone in the family. Invisible injuries, both physical and psychological, including traumatic brain injury and combat-related stress disorders, are often not diagnosed until many months after a service member returns from war (if they are diagnosed at all-many sufferers never seek treatment). They can alter a service member's behavior and personality in ways that make parenting difficult and reverberate throughout the family. And a parent's death in combat not only brings immediate grief but can also mean that survivors lose their very identity as a military family when they must move away from their supportive military community. Sifting through the evidence on both military and civilian families, Allison Holmes, Paula Rauch, and Stephen Cozza analyze, in turn, how visible injuries, traumatic brain injuries, stress disorders, and death affect parents' mental health, parenting capacity, and family organization; they also discuss the community resources that can help families in each situation. They note that most current services focus on the needs of injured service members rather than those of their families. Through seven concrete recommendations, they call for a greater emphasis on family-focused care that supports resilience and positive adaptation for all members of military families who are struggling with a service member's injury or death.

Evaluation of a Family-Centered Preventive Intervention for Military Families: Parent and Child Longitudinal Outcomes

“…1,2 Military children and their parents have negotiated the unprecedented challenges of recurrent separations, frequent moves, and the high operational tempo associated with a country engaged in a long war overseas. 3 Many children have also experienced the hardships of parental injury, illness, and even loss within their families, influencing both child and parental well-being over time, 1,4 as well as the reverberating impact of these events within their communities (for review, see Holmes et al 5 ). A rapidly expanding body of research has consistently documented increased social, emotional, behavioral, and academic risk associated with parental wartime military service for children across developmental periods, as well as the direct and indirect reverberations of heightened stress across the family system (for review, see Lester and Flake 6 ).…”

Addressing the Needs of Military Children Through Family-Based Play Therapy

“…In general, multiple stressors, social isolation, difficulty accessing available resources, financial and lifestyle issues, and the private nature of military families lead to a variety of familial functioning issues, including neglect, abuse, and long-term psychosocial dysfunction of some members (Johnson and Ling 2013). According to Holmes et al (2013), the individuals most disturbed by inconsistent functioning in a family are the children. When inconsistent Contemp Fam Ther (2015) 37:209-220 211 family functioning is combined with the emptiness and uncertainty of grief, intensive treatment is likely necessary to prevent long-term issues for everyone involved.…”

Promoting coping for children of hospitalized service members with combat injuries through creative arts engagement

“…Whether an injury is visible or invisible affects the child's response (Holmes et al, 2013). Injuries such as amputations, blindness or eye injuries, auditory damage, burns, spinal cord injuries and paralysis are classified as visible and are easily identified by others.…”

“…In addition, caring for the injured parent and taking on new responsibilities may mean the uninjured parent, too, is unavailable for the children (Holmes et al, 2013). Thus, at a time of multiple sources of stress, the parent/child relationship is strained, children have fewer resources and their risk for maladaptation increases.…”

“…A core principle of combat injury care at all phases of the injury trajectory is that the focus of service provision needs to be the family, not just the injured service member (Holmes, Rauch, & Cozza, 2013).…”