David Jones
Director of Military Programming for the National Fatherhood Initiative
"Parenting the Mobile Child"
Air & Space Conference and Technology Exposition 2005
September 12, 2005
Mr. Jones: I'm very honored to be here, very humbled to be here amongst my brothers and sisters in the armed forces. This is a topic that I have a lot of passion about.
A lot of you might be looking at me and saying, “what's this guy up here going to teach me about parenting? He looks about 18, if that.” [Laughter] Yeah, that's true, but I do have four young children of my own. Our oldest just started kindergarten, so I have four under the age of five, and yes, they were all planned. [Laughter] I'm from Utah, and being from Utah, I have to have the disclaimer that I only have one wife with those four children. [Laughter]
The other thing that you might be thinking, if you read my bio, you know that I'm a member of the Utah Army National Guard and I see a lot of blue out there. It looks like a sea. So I hope that doesn't influence your thinking. Remember, we're supposed to be a joint force. Can I get a hooah on that at least? [Hooahs] Good. I see a couple of green shirts out there.
This is a topic that I'm very passionate about. I've spent whatever short career I had and all my education experience studying families, and in particular military families. I worked as a State Family Program Director for the Utah National Guard. This is a topic that I'm very passionate about. I love the work that I do with the National Fatherhood Initiative, and I'll talk a little bit more about that later, but I'm just very glad to be here.
“Parenting the Military Child” is such a broad subject. Number one, military children aren't aliens. They're regular kids, right? Our kids are regular kids, they just have some unique challenges that their civilian counterparts don't have.
If you have children at different ages and they come and ask questions like “how does a TV work,” “how does an airplane fly,” and “why do you have to go to war,” what are your responses going to be? The answer is they're going to be different for each child, right? Especially this question which a lot of us have had to answer lately, right, the last one? How many of you had to answer a question similar to that in the last few years? Our responses are going to be different based on the age and stage of the child. That's the most important thing.
I'm not a parenting expert, and the stuff I'm going to give you today that's in your handout is all stuff based on theory and research on families and children in general. It's very basic stuff, but I thought I would try and apply it to the military context.
The important thing to think about with your children is that they're regular children with unique challenges, and we try and address those unique challenges but still be regular moms and dads. Not trying to be military moms and dads, just trying to be regular moms and dads.
We’ll talk a little bit about demographics and then we'll look at different perspectives of what children might be looking at according to one or a couple of pieces of different theories, and we’ll talk about the emotional deployment cycle. How many of you have seen that before? The emotional cycle of deployment? Good.
Different types of parents, being an involved military parent ... We're all leaders in this military and we have subordinates and one of the best things we can do for those subordinates is to support their role as parents.
A quick demographic look at military children and families ... There are about 1.8 million children in the military right now, and that's according to Defense Enrollment Eligibility Reporting System (DEERS) data. That's a big number. That's a lot of kids. Forty-one percent of our active duty kids are under the age of five, which is such a huge, developmentally important stage. So the question is what are we doing for these kids? And again, remember, they're regular kids, but with unique challenges.
An interesting trend that shows what's happened over the past 15 years now with single parents in the military ... The number of single parents has been on just a slight incline. It's not alarming. It's 2,000 or 3,000, depending on the gender of the parent. It's not huge, but at the same time—and a lot of you have been around for this—look at what was happening during that same period of time with the total active duty force. They dropped by about 600,000.
So why do we have an increasing number of single parents when there's a decrease in total soldiers? I don't know the answer. I don't know that there is an answer yet, at least researched, but it's just an interesting question to ask that definitely has an impact on our children.
Children look at the world a little bit more black and white than we do, especially young children. Some theories say they just have “concrete thinking,” that’s how they put it. It's just this way or that way and that's it. As you're thinking about your own children, you know what I'm talking about probably.
Oftentimes the big picture is difficult, so in explaining how an airplane flies or why mom or dad has to go to war, they don't understand that big picture because their family is their world. All they know is that their mom or dad is deploying and going to war or whatever other issues that might be faced.
I’d like to now go over one theory about child development. I'm going to disclaim this by saying this is one theory, and it's not the all-encompassing theory about child development. It's just one theory and it's a good theory.
A man by the name of Eric Erickson divided child—in fact, human—development up into different stages. He went all the way through adulthood. Children are ultimately looking for a sense of identity and a sense of self. Who am I? What do I have to offer? What can I provide? During each stage, the child is trying to resolve some sort of crisis or conflict in their mind. The resolution of a conflict brings a core ego strength for that child to carry through the rest of his or her life.
Let me go into the stages and maybe that will help explain it. But just keep in mind that the children ultimately—and this is all for the most part in the subconscious—are looking for themselves. They're having some sort of a conflict. A lot of this is Freudian-type theory, so if you know anything about Sigmund Freud, it's weird theory, but some of it has some application.
Children, birth to age one. How many of you have them this age? Okay. We just had a beautiful daughter about three months ago. Babies in this stage are looking for trust versus mistrust. They're having some sort of a conflict that they're trying to resolve. Trust versus mistrust. There's a battle going on in their head. Now Eric Erickson has a little bit more explanation on some of this stuff. But the baby is looking for what they can trust. Can they trust their parents? Can they trust that if I cry, my needs going to be met? Will I get fed? Will I get changed? Who can't I trust?
Now Eric Erickson doesn't say they have to develop all trust and no mistrust, because mistrust is important. They have to be judges of people and things. But children at this age are trying to develop a sense of trust in those around them, and especially in their caretakers. If they achieve that level of trust, they develop this core ego strength of hope. They have hope for the world, they think things are good and fulfilling—and all this is going on in a one-year-old's mind obviously—and they think that the world is a good place to be in. They have hope for their life in this world. So that's infancy.
Let's go on to the next stage. Early childhood ages. Again—oh, there's a lot of hands on that one. I have them at all stages, it seems like. It's kind of scary. Children at this age are trying to develop a sense of autonomy. They're exercising choice. How many of you have heard “NO!” recently from your two-year-old? Yeah. That's the only thing she says.
Now Eric Erickson says that the children are trying to exercise choice. If they say “yes” to anything, they're giving up their choice, that’s what's going on in their head. They're trying to develop a sense of autonomy versus shame and doubt. “Shame” is defined as not looking good in other's eyes, and “doubt” is a realization that others can control you. So children are having this conflict going on in their head … Can I do things on my own? Do I have some autonomy? Or is it wrong what I'm trying to do? Will I get laughed at? Will I get ridiculed? Will I get punished? They're trying to exercise choice.
If they develop this, Eric Erickson says they come up with a sense of will. Most of with children this age already know they have a lot of will, a lot of free will, and they're exercising it. That's how he explains that.
Middle childhood, ages four to five. How many this age? Good. How many of you are not active duty? Let me ask it that way? How many are Reserve or Guard? Okay. That goes along with the demographic we saw earlier that 41 percent of our children are under the age of five, and that's what we're seeing in this room here, too.
Children this age are developing a sense of initiative. They make plans, they set goals, they have competitions, imagination, things like that, versus guilt. Guilt at this age is defined as a realization that some goals will fail and are not appropriate.
Going back to my children, I work from my home in Utah, which is wonderful. I love spending time with my family, but part of that is I get to eat lunch with my children every day. My son just started kindergarten. He goes in in the morning. I went out for lunch, he had just come home from kindergarten, and in that lunch period I heard my baby cry and my wife went up and got her. She was helping develop trust. I heard my two-year-old tell me “no” about 300 times. I heard my almost four- and my five-year-old talk about a game that they had invented and they were excited to play. So it was interesting that they were all going through those stages. Now I don't suggest that you go get four young children and test this theory, but it was interesting to watch.
As children develop this sense of initiative they end up with a core ego strength of purpose. “I have a purpose in my life. I can accomplish.” You can see how some of these are building on each other.
Now Eric Erickson didn't say you had to complete one stage in order to get to the next one, it's just that if you don't accomplish the task it might mess things up a little bit later on. You can probably guess that a child that doesn't develop trust early on, maturation and biology will still push him through all these stages, but he's going to have some problems perhaps, right?
Late childhood. How many? Okay. And also know that these ages are approximate. Even Eric Erickson was a little bit hesitant to put ages on these stages, but I think these actually came after him. Children at this age are looking for a sense of industry, like a mastery of skills, cognitive and social skills, versus inferiority. And if they reach this, then their core ego strength is that they're competent. They know they can accomplish and they can do things.
You see this prevalent in school-age children. I see them fighting this battle a lot. “I'm not as good as Johnny who read 50 books this year in second grade,” or whatever. I'm guessing on that because I don't have any that age. They're all too young.
Teenagers are looking to find identity, a definition of oneself. We remember those teenage years. They were hard. We were trying to fit in. We were trying to find out what our role was and who we could hang out with that we could fit in with and be a part of, and a lot of times kids are trying to fit in in the wrong group and they just get absorbed in that and then they run into problems. They often look to cliques, peers, and even the media to see how they fit into society because they're looking for their identity.
If they accomplish this, their core ego strength is fidelity. That's kind of a difficult word, but how Erickson defined it was a sense that they can stay loyal to their values and principles. In other words, if I develop a sense of identity that I'm this type of a person, I'm a good person, I'm helpful, I have a lot of integrity, their core ego strength is that they will continue to hold to that value, those values that they've established.
Here are some other general childhood and adolescent themes that come out of research and theory that I think are kind of interesting ... They aren't Eric Erickson, but I want to talk about them briefly.
Children are egocentric. Their perspective is the only perspective, and that starts all the way from young childhood. I'm recalling some research they did on having children describe the three-dimensional object of a mountain. They could only describe what they saw and no other perspective mattered or even existed as far as they knew.
Young children can be viewed as little scientists. How many of us have felt like experiments on occasion? They're testing, not to be deviant, but they're trying to figure out their role. They're trying to say, “okay, I'm going to test this boundary not because I'm a bad child, not because I'm a rebellious child, but I just need to know. So I'm going to test. If I run outside to the street, what are my mom and dad going to do?” They're developing hypotheses about their parents and things like that.
Teens. This is one of my favorites. Teens are often performing for an imaginary audience. How many of you remember that? How many of you felt like all eyes were on you when you were a teenager, like I feel right now? [Laughter]
They develop personal fables about themselves. A lot of times this goes to the extent of if “I wasn't here, what would happen? Would they care? Would my family even care?” That gets a little scary sometimes, but that's what happens and a lot of us had those feelings as adolescents. That's why this one's so interesting, because it was semi-recent for a lot of us in the room.
At the National Fatherhood Initiative we did a public service announcement that depicted the imaginary audience, or the personal fable, of a teenage girl. She needed Maxipads, but was embarrassed to buy them at a drugstore because “everybody will see me.” She had a teenage boy behind the counter who was also having this imaginary audience and everybody was looking. He'd probably be embarrassed to sell that to a teenage girl because then he'd have to confront that issue. That's just an example of what adolescents are going through.
What does that have to do with our kids? Military kids?
I'm going to go over the deployment cycle and the emotional cycle of deployment. All of us in here are somewhat familiar with what it takes to deploy. A unit receives an alert of some sort, there's a pre-deployment period. They actually deploy and that's referred to as the “period of time.” One month into the deployment. Then there's a period of sustainment where you're there, you're accomplishing the mission, things are pretty much smoothed out as far as logistics and what not. Then you get ready to come home. The military term is “redeployment,” and I think that's a confusing term, but that actually refers to getting ready to come home. Then the post-deployment period. So that's what the military member or the military unit experiences.
Upon receiving notice of the deployment, the child experiences an emotional uproar and anticipation of loss. If any of you are familiar with the grieving process, I think Elisabeth Kubler Ross is the person who examined the grieving process. This is similar, a lot of correlations. They experience an anticipation of loss. They're nervous, it's coming, they don't know what to think. They might experience a sense of denial, “it's not really going to happen.” This can be a very tense time. Arguments and fears... I'm preaching to the choir on a lot of this stuff. You might remember it. Children might also experience a lot of clinginess or even distancing, opposites…and you never know with each child. We all know that the children are different.
Then, right up to before the deployment, there might be a period of detachment. Basically they’re saying, “if you have to go, just go. Let's get this over with, I don't want to experience these feelings I'm having right now and this anticipation of loss phase. If you have to go, let's go and get it over with.” This is probably the most difficult stage, I think. A very difficult time because people feel guilty about having those thoughts. “If you have to go just go, but I don't really want you to go.”
The next stage is the disorganization phase, about one month after the deployment starts, where the feelings are sometimes guilt and confusion, sometimes relief that their parent is actually gone and they don't have to deal with that anticipation phase anymore. There’s fear, and a lot of pride. You see that a lot, too.
I always appreciated—I don't want to say loved—going out to see families see off their service members. I was working with the Utah Guard at the time, and I could see this range of emotions going through their heads. Very proud, but scared and nervous, and some angry. That was my job, to deal with the angry ones mostly. Also during this time families are trying to renegotiate roles and routines and try and compensate for the deployed parent.
After that there's a period of stabilization. Things are okay. “We can manage. We've renegotiated our roles, our routines a little bit, we're doing okay.” Of course they'd rather have that person back, but especially once the unit gets in theater and there's increased communication, things like that help.
The next part is the big anticipation of return. The building up of expectations happens a lot at this time, with apprehension or nervousness. A lot of times the child might be thinking, “will my mom/dad who's coming home like the changes that I've experienced? Will he/she have changed?” So there's this nervousness. Even though it's supposed to be a very exciting time, this happens a lot. During my time with the Utah Guard, this was one of the busiest times for us. Helping with counseling and communication was key.
Then the parent finally gets home and there's a period of reintegration. That's when the roles are renegotiated and the family can go back into their normal routine for the most part. A lot of us have experiences where it didn't quite happen that way, but that's the model. You're going to look at this and say, “we didn't experience that.” But it's just a model. It's one way of theorizing what goes on.
Would anybody care to offer an example? Something you maybe have seen in your own child or something that you just think might happen?
Voice: I'm 22 years old and my daughter will be five next week. This happens to be my first deployment trip away from home. The one thing I noticed for sure was the pre-deployment stage in the car, on the way to the airport. She's sitting in the back seat, and very uncomfortably she asked to touch my hands.
Mr. Jones: So during that phase of deployment you might see that clinginess. Your child’s imagination is going a little out of whack with what might happen while mama's gone. Or she might feel that the plans that you have aren't going to work because “my mom's not going to be here.” This can be taken very broadly, but it’s an example.
Know that your children are experiencing different things at different stages, and particularly when you deploy—and I haven't even mentioned other military issues, like relocation and even short TDY separation. But just think about some of the things they might be experiencing and what you can do as a parent.
What can you do as a parent? This is probably one of the most popularly researched concepts on parenting, different types of parenting. A woman by the name of Diana Baumrind examined the different levels of control and responsiveness that a parent might have when they raise their child. She found that parents fell into one of four quadrants for the most part.
If a parent was very undemanding, with low control, and unresponsive to their children, they might be neglectful parents. That's how she defined them.
If a parent was very undemanding and low control, but very responsive and very involved in their children's lives, they might be indulgent or permissive parents. We all have those friends, right? We weren't those kids, but we all had those friends.
If a parent is very rejecting, unresponsive and parent-centered and had a high level of control and demand, they were viewed as authoritarian parents.
An interesting side note … The public thinks that military parents are authoritarian. There's a theory that’s not very well accepted out there and it's called “The Military Family Syndrome.” In this paradigm, you have an authoritative father, a depressed mother, and wild children. [Laughter] Does that describe your family at all? There's actually research done on that and it hasn’t been very well received. But people think that because we're in the military and we have these subordinates, we might treat our children like privates and march them around and drill them around. I haven't seen that too much in my experience with military families. But the public, in the movies and stuff, they portray that sort of thing.
The best level of parenting is a parent who is accepting, responsive and child-centered, meaning they might even have to sacrifice a little bit, but have a good degree of control and follow-through with their children. That means they hold their children accountable. They're involved in their children's schoolwork, for example. They make sure the homework gets done. They show control. It's important to have that with children, but they're also responsive and focusing on what the child needs. Does that make sense? Has anybody heard of this sort of stuff before?
So which one do you think you want to be? Right…the authoritative parent.
One of my professors at Brigham Young University that I respect dearly, he loved this stuff. He did research in China and Russia, all over the place, on the authoritative parent. Here are some of the outcomes of children with authoritative parents. They're better in most areas of life: social, intellectual, emotional. Pre-schoolers are a lot more self-reliant, self-controlled, patient. Older girls are more independent and achievement-oriented and have higher self esteem. Older boys are friendly and cooperative and also have high self esteem. And children are more likely to internalize the good parental values and morals of their parents.
So those are the outcomes of authoritative parenting. What I was about to say is this is shown not only across different cultures, but also across different ethnicities, different socio and economic statuses of families. An authoritative parent is by far, research shows, the best type of parent you can be for your children. Someone who is child-centered and shows some control.
This is an interesting concept that goes along with that. Different spheres of influence. Who has the greatest influence in teaching the child about society? Who do you think? Do you think the media has a lot of influence? The schools? Do their peers? Oh, yeah, a lot. Religion? Other adults?
Let's take a look at a concept that same professor I mentioned earlier developed that I really like. It’s a model of children with involved parents and their “sphere of influence” as he calls it. Children with involved, authoritative parents have a large sphere of influence.
What happens when you have a parent who is not so involved? Their sphere of influence decreases. What else decreases? School work. So if you have a parent who's not involved, the child doesn't care as much about school and doesn't get as much influence from school is what the research shows. If you have a parent who's not involved they also don't get as much out of what other adults might say—teachers or coaches or extended family members, people like that. If you have a parent who's not involved, religion also doesn't mean as much to children.
So who does gain influence in this model? Media and peers.
The reason my professor that I talked about did this sort of study was to explain or define what happened during the Columbine shootings in Colorado. He looked at the type of parents that these young kids had, and looked at what other influences they had in their lives and found that those young men didn't have any of these other influences and it was directly correlated with the amount of involvement their parents had in their lives. They had a high level of influence, however, from their peers and media. Make sense?
Sometimes kids get upset because their parents are trying to control their lives, particularly adolescents. Obviously you have those battles with your teenagers—I know I did when I was a teenager—but the children do need that involvement and authoritative parenting is the best.
Research shows that both parents play a significant role in the development of their children. Now this isn't to say that single parents don't do a great job. I had a single mom. She did a wonderful job. She did the very best she could and she raised four good kids. I love my mother. But research shows that moms and dads provide different, unique things to the lives of their children.
We've conceptualized it this way. Fathers to young men are seen as role models. They show young men what young men should be doing. That's obvious. Sometimes we don't think about this one—fathers are relational models to the young women. Fathers are role models to boys and relational models to girls. They show the girls how to relate to the opposite sex.
What happens if you take dad out of that picture? Boys don't have a role model and girls don't have a relational model. Are they going to try and find something to fill that gap? Usually. That's why research shows that children without dads, the boys are more involved with alcohol and gangs and violence and things like that because they get in with the wrong crowd. Girls are more likely to get pregnant before marriage if they don't have a dad in their lives, because somewhere deep down they're trying to fill that gap.
Likewise, moms show girls how to be women, and they show men how to relate to women. Take mom out of the picture and you're going to have some of the same problems.
Be an involved, authoritative military parent. Here are tips that any parent can follow: Spend time with your children. Discipline them with love, but do discipline them. Show some control, but do it with love. Be a role model. Be a teacher. Eat together as a family. Read to your children. Show affection. Cooperate with your spouse or your co-parent. A lot of us are in different family situations, but our children need their parents to cooperate.
The things that I do as the Director of Military Programming for the National Fatherhood Initiative are really focused on being an involved parent even when you're deployed. Most of you got a copy of our “Ten Ways to Stay Involved with your Children During Deployment” brochures. It's targeted at dads. That doesn't mean it's not applicable to mothers.
For those of us you who are leaders and have subordinates, there are some things that you can do to help support the parents in your unit or in your office. Allow them time off to be parents. I realize in the military a lot of this stuff is very difficult. We can't fully compare the military to civilian organizations that have a little bit more flexibility in the things they do, but there are some things military leaders can do.
Implement a “Take Your Child to Work Today” program. Does anybody do anything like that in the military? I'm just curious. I can imagine a lot of you with the airplanes and other things that you work on, that would be really interesting for kids. Why not do an organizational family day and have the kids come in and see what mom and dad do during work?
Sponsor parenting seminars or classes. I hear a lot about unit leaders who allow an afternoon off to go do a seminar with their spouse or something like that. In the Guard, they even get a retirement point for some of the stuff that we have them do.
Our mission at the National Fatherhood Initiative goes right along with this, and even though we're focused on fathers, we recognize the important role of mothers. Our basic mission is to improve the well-being of children by increasing the proportion of children that grow up with involved, responsible and committed parents.
Now this isn't intended to be a sales pitch, but I'm going to go over briefly some of the things that we do for military fathers in particular. We have our “Deployed Fathers and Families Guide,” and our “Ten Ways to Stay Involved with your Children During Deployment.” Those are our military-specific products and we're developing a couple of others; a reunion brochure, and things like that.
We have a fun concept called “Daddy Packs.” Most of us who are fathers know that when the wife had a baby, did we get any of that good freebie stuff that the wife got? We got to carry it home, right? [Laughter] The only thing I've ever gotten as a new father was a "Don't Shake Your Baby" video. Which is certainly important—I don't want to make that sound not important—but it kind of sends the wrong message, that that's all I'm good for as a dad?
These Daddy Packs are designed for hospital administrators or new parent support programs to give to the dad at the birth of their child. In fact, we just finished a project here in the DC area where we distributed 2,500 of these to military installations. Bolling and Andrews Air Force Base got them, among many other installations.
We recognize that dads are busy, especially in the military. I read one report that shows the average military member works about eight hours more than his or her civilian counterpart per week. We've developed some interactive CD-ROMS to help kind of counter that. Moms and dads can get education on their own time. Then our brochures…these are an easy way to implement education in your unit or your office.
In closing, I love this quote. This came from General Douglas MacArthur when he was nominated for Father of the Year in 1942. He said, "By profession I am a soldier and I take great pride in that fact," and I tell you I do, too, and I know most of you do. "But I am prouder, infinitely prouder, to be a father." That's how I feel. I love my children and my personal philosophy is that no other success can compensate for failure in the home, and I really believe that. So I try and instigate that into all things that I do in my life and with what I do with the National Fatherhood Initiative.
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