The Families Behind the Force

For more than two decades, the United States military has studied war’s consequences: casualties, traumatic brain injuries, PTSD, suicide, toxic exposures, cancer, readiness, retention, and resilience. Those efforts saved lives. Yet while we studied what war did to the warfighter, we devoted far less attention to what those same wars did to the children growing up beside them.

That experience has remained with me because it represents a question, we have never adequately answered: What happens to military children during and after war? Many show resilience, adaptability, and purpose. Yet we still lack sustained research on both their challenges and the protective factors that help many thrive.

Today, about 1.6 million military-connected children live in the United States, and nearly 80 percent attend public schools rather than military schools. Many lived through deployments, separations, relocations, reintegration, parental injury, and uncertainty in homes and communities across the country.

The research is concerning but fragmented. RAND found that Army children whose parents deployed for 19 months or more after 2001 had modestly lower achievement scores than peers with less or no parental deployment. Blue Star Families and others have documented anxiety, depression, behavioral challenges, academic disruption, access problems, and family stress. Yet these snapshots rarely capture both the military-specific stressors and the cohesion, structure, support, and purpose that help many military children thrive.

Military children commonly move six to nine times before high school graduation, with some estimates placing annual school transitions around 200,000 students. Some also watch parents struggle with PTSD, traumatic brain injury, chronic pain, or toxic-exposure-related illness. Yet there is no national longitudinal study examining how these experiences shape outcomes over decades.

The gap becomes sharper with National Guard and Reserve families. Much existing research focuses on active-duty populations because they are easier to identify and study. They often live near installations, healthcare systems, and military communities. Guard families are different.

After September 11, the National Guard became an operational force, deploying repeatedly overseas while also responding to hurricanes, floods, civil unrest, pandemics, and domestic emergencies. The Guard became essential to national defense. Yet the families supporting those Soldiers often remained invisible.

Unlike active-duty families, Guard families often live far from military installations and support systems. Their children attend civilian schools where few classmates understand deployment, and school staff may not know a parent is deployed until grades, attendance, or behavior begin to change.

A child in Leesville, Killeen, Fayetteville, or Columbus at least grows up around military culture. A child in Bastrop, Ruston, Monroe, or countless other Guard communities may spend an entire deployment surrounded by people who have never experienced military life at all.

The military often knows exactly where the Soldier is deployed. It frequently knows far less about what is happening at the kitchen table back home.

This creates a research blind spot. We know little about how repeated Guard deployments affected children outside military communities, or how families managed reintegration, PTSD, toxic exposure concerns, disability, and long-term stress without traditional support networks.

The operational reserve was one of the most significant organizational changes in modern military history. We studied what it did to the force, readiness, and retention. We failed to adequately study what it did to the children.

One of the most striking gaps involves loss itself. The military can count the dead, wounded, disabled, and exposed. It can track suicides and service-connected illnesses. Yet many family losses remain invisible.

How many military children lose a parent to suicide?

How many children or young adults are helping care for disabled, ill, or injured veterans?

How many children watched a parent develop cancer linked to toxic exposure?

For many families, the war did not end when deployment ended. A parent returns home, builds a career, raises children, and appears to have transitioned. Then a diagnosis arrives: cancer, respiratory disease, neurological decline, chronic pain, or PTSD that worsens over time. Suddenly a child who thought the war was over is watching it reappear inside the home. For some children, war’s effects are felt in the quiet calculation of reading a parent’s mood before speaking, the anxiety after a slammed door, a school counselor’s concern over changed behavior, or a child learning too early to manage tension inside the home. These wounds rarely appear in military records, but they are part of the long shadow of war.

The first generation of Global War on Terror military children is now reaching adulthood. Many who watched deployments as children are now watching the long-term consequences of those wars unfold inside their own families.

What are their educational, health, family, work, and service outcomes? As some raise children of their own, tracking these young adults would illuminate intergenerational risk and resilience and help policymakers understand how military service affects families long after deployments end.

The military has devoted considerable effort to surviving spouses and Gold Star families, yet far less attention has gone to the long-term outcomes of children who lost a parent in combat, to suicide, or to service-connected illness years after the war ended. The effects of military service do not stop with the service member.

Military families also experience losses outside traditional discussions of readiness and veteran health. The death of a child, for example, can alter marriages, sibling relationships, family identity, and the emotional health of parents for decades. We know too little about how military families carry and recover from such losses.

The warning signs are already visible. Blue Star Families reported that 43 percent of respondents rated at least one child’s mental health as fair, poor, or very poor; 5 percent reported a child expressing suicidal thoughts; 23 percent reported a K-12 child receiving mental health care; and 16 percent wanted care but were not receiving it. These numbers should be viewed alongside broader national trends, but they should prompt serious questions. If military leaders would not ignore rising readiness or force-protection indicators, why ignore them in the population that will inherit the long-term consequences of war?

We also fail to study resilience. I think of a friend, a combat veteran, who died by suicide, and of the son he left behind. Watching that young man continue forward raises questions we should study: What supports—family, school, teammates, faith, mentors, and community—help a child carry that kind of loss and keep moving? If we only study damage, we miss the factors that help children survive and adapt.

Military leaders understand prevention. We invest in body armor, aircraft maintenance, and force protection because preventing loss is better than responding afterward. Prevention is not simply humanitarian. It is a readiness imperative.

Rather than waiting for crises, the Department of Defense, Department of Veterans Affairs, National Institutes of Health, Department of Education, and researchers should undertake a longitudinal study of military children. It should examine mental health, education, family stability, caregiver burdens, resilience, suicide risk, bereavement, toxic exposure impacts, access to care, and long-term quality of life, with Guard and Reserve families included from the start.

This research should place military children within the broader context of American childhood. A serious study would not assume every hardship was caused by military service. It would distinguish deployment, relocation, parental injury, military culture, and reintegration from wider pressures affecting all young people.

Military children should not be studied in isolation. Their outcomes are shaped by parents, siblings, schools, coaches, faith communities, and civilian communities. A serious effort should identify both risk factors and the supports that help children navigate deployments, injuries, illnesses, and loss.

If the United States can spend tens of millions on overseas cultural initiatives and niche academic grants, we can certainly afford a serious longitudinal study of military children and targeted support for the families who sustain the force. Prioritizing data and prevention for those who carry the longest burdens of war is not charity. It is sound national security policy.

This is also a national security issue. Blue Star Families reported that military families likely to recommend service fell from 55 percent in 2016 to about one-third in recent years, with quality-of-life concerns including mental health care, spouse employment, housing, and children’s education. Many military children later serve themselves. How we treat military families today shapes who will be willing to serve tomorrow.

The military profession prides itself on learning from experience. After more than twenty years of conflict, one of the most important studies we have never seriously undertaken involves the families who carried those wars home. We spent decades measuring what war did to the warfighter. The next step is understanding what war did to the children who grew up beside them. No child should have to stand beside a combat veteran parent on the front line of an invisible war inside the home. Until we understand that burden, one of the largest populations touched by military service will remain invisible—not because the questions are unimportant, but because we never treated them with the same urgency we brought to every other consequence of war.

Mark W. Castillon served in the Army National Guard from 2004 to 2024, with deployments in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom and Operation New Dawn, as well as domestic emergency response missions from Hurricane Katrina through the COVID-19 pandemic. He advocates for veteran mental health, whistleblower protection, leadership accountability, and due-process reform in military personnel systems.

image: A soldier embraces family members during one of several welcome-home ceremonies held across Iowa in March for the 2nd Brigade Combat Team, 34th Infantry Division. (U.S. Army National Guard photos by Spc. Armani Wilson)