Maternal and Paternal Deployment: Differential Impact on the Functioning of Military-Connected Youth

Objective:  Parental military deployment has been associated with increased mental health symptoms, suicidality and substance use among the children of male service members. This relationship, however, has not been explored among the children of female service members, and it is not known how the gender of a military-involved parent may impact the established relationship between experiences of parental deployment and negative outcomes for children.  This study examines how military parents’ gender may moderate the association between number of parental deployments and well-being and depression outcomes among military-connected children.  

Methods:  Data for this study were drawn from the 2011 California Healthy Kids Survey (CHKS) to eight school districts in southern California.  The CHKS is a self-report survey administered biennially to all 5^th, 7^th, 9^th, and 11^th grade students in the state.   The initial sample included 14,149 students; these analyses were run on a subsample of 1,370 7^th, 9^th and 11^th grade students who reported having a mother or father in the military.   Outcome variables included two scales representing well-being and depressive symptoms drawn from the CHKS Military-Connected Schools Module.  These scales, adapted from the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule-Expanded Form and the Kessler 6, included six items, measuring student reports of positive and negative affect over the past 30 days.  Two sets of OLS regression models were run to predict well-being and depression by grade in school (a proxy for age), gender, race/ethnicity, number of parental deployments, military parent’s gender and the interaction of deployments and parent’s gender. 

Results:  Close to 10% of participants reported having a mother in the military and over 65% reported experiencing two or more parental deployments.  For depressive symptoms, we found both a main effect for the impact of two or more deployments (β=-0.15, p=0.0485) as well as a significant interaction effect between deployments and parent’s gender (β=.10, p=0.0208), indicating that children of female service members experience more depressive symptoms than the children of male service members as the number of deployments increases.  For well-being, we also found a main effect for the impact of two or more deployments (β=0.24, p=0.0049).  However, this finding represented a positive association between deployments and well-being, which was unexpected.  No moderation effects were found in the well-being models.  

Discussion:  This study is consistent with previous literature in finding support for a cumulative effect of successive parental deployments on child depressive symptoms.  However, these results indicate that this effect is stronger among the children of female service members than male service members, a finding which extends the knowledge base regarding outcomes for military-connected youth.  Further, these findings suggest that well-being may increase as a result of successive deployments.  While seemingly counter-intuitive, this finding may represent evidence of resilience in military-connected children.  Further research examining the potential positive impacts of deployment may be warranted.  These results also suggest that prevention and intervention efforts should be explicitly targeted at the children of female service members as they may have unique experiences, which result in greater risk of adverse outcomes.