Strengthening the Military Family Readiness System for a Changing American Society (2019) / Chapter Skim
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2 Family Well-Being, Readiness, and Resilience
2 Family Well-Being, Readiness, and Resilience
Pages 35-72
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From page 35... ...
This is followed by a discussion of the ways various dimensions of family well-being within the military context are illuminated by developmental science, bioecological models of individual and family development, and life course theory. Equal importance is placed on reviewing the concepts of family readiness and resilience within the military context.
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From page 36... ...
LINKAGES BETWEEN FAMILY ISSUES AND MILITARY READINESS Most of the evidence regarding links between family issues and military readiness assumes or ignores the positive contributions of families to military service. An exception is the literature related to choosing military service, which shows that parents appear to be important influencers of youths' decisions to enlist and to take tangible steps toward doing so (Gibson et al., 2007; Legree et al., 2000)
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From page 37... ...
tabulated results from multiple samples of Army soldiers showing that family-related factors were significantly related to multiple indicators of soldier readiness. Data from more than 4,500 Army participants in the 1992 DoD Survey of Officers and Enlisted Personnel indicated that soldiers' perceptions of spouses' satisfaction with soldier family time and soldiers' satisfaction with the environment for families both were significantly related to satisfaction with military life and their military job, after controlling for years of service, unit morale, and unit readiness.
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From page 38... ...
, which showed that Air Force women who became mothers in the 2 years following the launch of Operation Desert Storm were twice as likely to leave military service as women who did not have children. Across the full sample, there were five reasons for leaving that were each reported by more than 20 percent of the respondents.
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From page 39... ...
. An article summarizing the evidence base for Total Force Fitness asserts that "social and family fitness are essential to total force fitness and impact performance from such disparate areas as the rate of wound healing to overall unit functioning" (Jonas et al., 2010, p.
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From page 40... ...
The rise of family diversity and complexity has increased the difficulty of assigning individual families to a single category in a standardized list (Cherlin and Seltzer, 2014)
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From page 41... ...
. One example of an objective standard is budgets created to identify the minimum income necessary for family self-sufficiency.3 For military families, the ability to meet such budgets depends on several conditions: whether service members and their partners have adequate employment opportunities, pay, and benefits (Mason, 2018; Military Officers Association of America, 2018)
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From page 42... ...
MILITARY-FOCUSED DEFINITIONS OF WELL-BEING DoD does not have an agreed-upon definition of family well-being. Although the Defense Center of Excellence for Psychological Health and Traumatic Brain Injury (2011)
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From page 43... ...
. Other trends contributing to family diversity include increases in the prevalence of shared custody of children following divorce and in the number of couples who do not live together, same-sex couples, and mixed-immigration-status families.
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From page 44... ...
. The committee notes that for military families, there are two possible roles in which caregivers and/or spouses may be sandwiched: (i)
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IMPLICATIONS FOR THE DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE There may be a large and rising number of families that are invisible because they are neither tabulated nor targeted in family readiness efforts (Hawkins et al., 2018; Meyers, 2018)
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From page 46... ...
Individuals who currently have the same marital status, for example, may have quite different family responsibilities because of differences in their respective histories of family transitions and family instability. The focus on marriage and legal dependents in military policy also means that far more is known about certain kinds of military families -- service members (mostly male)
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From page 47... ...
. Third, fully understanding military families and their needs may require greater attention to family diversity and complexity.
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From page 48... ...
Segal and colleagues' (2015) military life course model highlights service members' stress points, such as deployment or injury, as well as family life events, whether specific to military life or not (e.g., birth of child)
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From page 49... ...
Acculturation will also be influenced by component, by the individual family member's history of service, that is, whether he or she is new to the military or earlier generations have served, and by demographic characteristics, such as first language and racial, thnic, e and cultural background. Theories of acculturation are also helpful in understanding specific transitional experiences of military service members returning to the United States after deployment and in understanding the transition/reintegration challenges that may accompany the shift to civilian or other post-service life (Demers, 2011)
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From page 50... ...
discuss the term and theoretical framework to explain that each member of a family will influence and also will be affected by the other members of the family system. In the context of military families, this concept is useful in considering how the life course trajectories of service members' partners and children, in particular, are directly linked to the service member's career moves, deployments, and required trainings.
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From page 51... ...
On balance, the digital revolution also offers new opportunities for engagement, education, and interven tion in support of family readiness. aFor service branch-specific policies, see, for example, https://www.army.mil/socialmedia/, https://www.navy.mil/socialmediadocs/NavySocialMediaHandbook.pdf, https://www.navy.mil/ah_online/opsec/docs/Policy/Marines-Social-Media-Handbook.pdf, and https://static.e-publishing.af.mil/production/1/saf_pa/publication/afi35-107/afi35-107.pdf.
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From page 52... ...
The concept of tied migration is applicable in the military context and predominately affects women who are partnered with service members and children in military families (Segal et al., 2015)
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From page 53... ...
. Relevance of a Multilevel, Ecological Systems Framework for Prevention and Intervention Ecological or multilevel frameworks are useful in highlighting the differing experiences and accumulation of risk and adversity among service members and families, as well as the social and other environmental influences, including military policies, that can support individual and family readiness and resilience -- and they can likewise help in identifying barriers to individual and family well-being (Chmitorz et al., 2018)
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From page 54... ...
Overall, multilevel conceptualization indicates that to support the well-being of service members and their families, one needs to recognize diverse and multiple potential ports of entry for prevention, intervention, and capacity-building. RESILIENCE AND READINESS Family readiness and resilience are as important for DoD as family well-being, because they are rooted in families' need to be prepared for and adjust to the inevitable challenges of military life.
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From page 55... ...
Positive family functioning, for example, could be construed as either a factor or an outcome -- or both. Because family readiness focuses on preparation for adversity with the goal of maximizing resilient outcomes, it may be especially important to focus on the knowledge, skills, and abilities of family members as key resilience factors aimed at improving readiness, and to focus on family well-being when considering resilience outcomes.
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From page 56... ...
, and resilience training is not a "vaccination" against distress following adverse experiences. Some evidence suggests that individuals who ultimately experience posttraumatic growth experience above-average distress following adversity, before regaining positive adjustment (Bonanno et al, 2015, p.
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From page 57... ...
. In the case of military families, family resilience models must incorporate attention to structural forces -- such as organizational or government policies; socioeconomic status; and factors that define social loca tion, such as gender, race, or sexual orientation -- that influence service members and family resources, strengths, and vulnerabilities.
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From page 58... ...
. Protective factors are associated with better outcomes particularly in the presence of risk factors (Masten and Narayan, 2012)
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From page 59... ...
In their comprehensive review of research related to the resilience of military families, Hawkins and colleagues (2018) observed that the employment challenges and pay gaps experienced by military spouses -- especially wives -- represent significant challenges to resil ience, and also highlight accessibility as an important factor in the adequacy of support systems.
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From page 60... ...
personal and family readiness. In the Total Force Fitness8 model, the view of family fitness is more expansive, defining fitness as the ability of a family to use physical, psychological, social, and spiritual resources to prepare for, adapt to, and grow from the demands of military life (Westphal and Woodward, 2010)
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From page 61... ...
. MEASURING FAMILY READINESS AND RESILIENCE No gold standard instrument exists inside or outside DoD for assessing resilience in individuals (Windle et al., 2011)
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From page 62... ...
Family readiness and resilience may be supported by increasing the presence of resilience factors, facilitating the operation of resilience mechanisms, and by reducing exposure to adversity. Separation and relocation are relatively well understood as stressors, but at the present time, DoD does not monitor accumulations of adversity by military families, beyond attempts to track cumulative deployments by service members via the PERSTEMPO
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From page 63... ...
Developing agreed-upon definitions of family readiness and resilience will allow DoD to declare its most relevant indicators, which in turn will make it possible to identify the resilience factors most likely to produce those outcomes, and thus which knowledge, skills, and abilities are most important to promote through military family readiness activities. Some relevant information is undoubtedly already available from the Status of Forces surveys, program record data, and other sources.
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From page 64... ...
Every service member, including those who are unmarried, is part of some form of family, and all require assistance from informal support systems in order to perform military duties. CONCLUSION 2-4: The Department of Defense does not have a consistent definition of a family nor does it have a consistent defi nition and indicators of family readiness and resilience necessary to track relevance, effectiveness, and improvements of programs, services, resources, policies, and practices.
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From page 65... ...
. Invited Comments for the Committee on the Well-Being of Military Families.
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From page 66... ...
. What We Know About Military Family Readiness: Evidence from 2007-2017.
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From page 67... ...
, Life Course Perspectives on Military Service (pp.
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From page 68... ...
. Memo prepared for the Committee on the Well-Being of Military Families.
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From page 69... ...
. Military families and combat readiness.
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From page 70... ...
. Impact of Military Life on Children from Military Families.
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From page 71... ...
. Life Course Perspectives on Military Service.
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