The Mom Affect
Whether you are mom or dad, the civilian member of your home offers the greatest gift to a military child. We become the buffer to the stressful factors that most military kids must endure.
According to the study, “…a positive mother-child relationship may reduce children’s experience of loneliness and serve as a buffer against the ill effects of children’s experience in social isolation.”
Researchers found that if a maternal figure in the home had a positive attitude toward military life and a strong marriage, the children were more likely to feel secure and adjust well to new environments. It also found that if the family unit as a whole enjoyed spending time together and invested in the family relationship, the military child was less likely to feel anxiety and depression. The bottom line; the better the relationship you have between yourself and your child, the better chance they will have adjusting to new situations during relocation.
The same can be said for the opposite. The study sited that in almost every mother-child pairing, the mother’s depressive symptoms where directly correlated with the child’s feelings of sadness and anxiety. This fact stood out to me because it demonstrated how we directly impact our children. Whatever the perception mothers have of their military lifestyle will be the way their own children view the world. This is probably the greatest takeaway from this study because it clearly ties how we, as military families, can directly affect our children’s perception of their childhood.
