Coping With Their Parents' War

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Caring for the Kids of Soldiers

More than 800,000 military parents have been deployed since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and the separation can be hard on their young children.

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Angela J. Huebner, an associate professor of human development at Virginia Tech who helped lead a study of youths with deployed parents, said: "The kids who were doing well had resources. They had parents they could talk to. They felt supported."

Creativity and technology can help parents bridge the distance with their children. A Toledo company gives out "flat daddies" and "flat mommies," life-size posters of deployed parents. Many soldiers send home video recordings of themselves reading bedtime stories.

Arthur Rizer hid "Star Wars" action figures and other trinkets around the house before he left, and later sent Gabriel treasure maps to find them. For his younger son, Asher, only 1 at the time, Rizer made videotapes of himself teaching colors, shapes and numbers.

Many struggle with how much to tell their kids. As Robert Anderson, a father of three, prepared to leave his job at a West Point, Va., paper mill to patrol in Iraq with the Virginia Army National Guard, one of his twin sons, then 8, asked, "Dad, are you going to get killed?"

Anderson, who returned home in May after a year-long deployment, said he "didn't want to scare the living daylights" out of his son, but he wanted to be honest: "I just said, 'Son, the Lord will walk with me.' "

Once he got to his base in the Persian Gulf region, he called home often and stayed upbeat. "I made it count," he said. "It was, 'Hey, man, how was school today?' "

For parents called on more than once, maintaining relationships can be even more difficult. Soldiers "are missing graduations. They are missing birthdays. They are missing first steps," said Morten Ender, a sociology professor at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. "Now they are missing things multiple times. We don't know what kind of long-term impact that's going to have."

Robert Caudill got home in August 2006, and he has been spending time with Cody, signing up as an assistant Scoutmaster for his son's troop. But he feels a responsibility to his fellow soldiers, too, his wife said, and he plans to volunteer for Kosovo or Afghanistan.

Cody said he is fine with that because his dad expects to do desk work. Plus, Cody said, the military is helping people. "I see the good in it," he said.

With more children in military families under stress, schools are responding. In Virginia Beach, a military hub, June graduation ceremonies were streamed live on the Internet for military families. Marlene Durgin, dean of students at Indian River Intermediate School near the Army's Fort Drum, N.Y., said teachers know that anger, missed homework or missed days often are a sign of a parent's deployment. The school reaches out gently, she said, knowing that many parents shield children from news about war.

Last month, Staff Sgt. Tyler E. Pickett, 28, stepfather of one of Durgin's students, was killed by a car bomb in Iraq. He had been deployed twice before, in Afghanistan and in Iraq. When his body was brought home, a procession went by the school. One teacher asked why students and staff didn't line the street to show respect.

"The majority of our students didn't know we lost a soldier," Durgin recalled saying. "Can you imagine the panic you would feel as a fourth-grader? 'My dad is in Iraq. Is that going to happen to my dad?' "