Study offers Guard families help with parenting - Army News | News from Afghanistan & Iraq - Army Times

Study offers Guard families help with parenting

ST. PAUL, Minn. — A new study at the University of Minnesota is helping military parents deal with the stress of parenting — on top of the stress of returning from deployment.

Minnesota Public Radio News reports Friday that the five-year study will teach parenting techniques to National Guard families with soldiers who have served in Iraq or Afghanistan.

Over the next few years, researchers will recruit 400 families with children between the ages of 5 and 12. Some will learn the new techniques. Others will get resources normally given to military parents.

The $3.2 million study is funded by the National Institutes of Health and the National Institute on Drug Abuse.

Studies have shown the stress of deployment affects parenting and may lead to behavioral and emotional problems in children.

Abi Gewirtz, the study’s principal investigator, said the goal is to help people parent effectively despite the difficulties of deployment.

“The effects of deployment on kids are not ... just about combat stress symptoms that the soldier might be experiencing, but they are about the fact that the parent was gone for a year in the child’s life,” she said.

The parenting techniques are based on an existing program in Oregon, called the Oregon Parent Management Training. Gewirtz is adapting it to fit the needs of military families.

“It’s a parenting intervention that has been shown to be very, very effective at supporting parenting in other contexts, so our test is to see whether it works at promoting children’s resilience in this context,” Gewirtz said.

Research has shown that the period when soldiers return from combat is often the most stressful time for military families, so Gewirtz said that’s when families will be enrolled in the study.

At a recent workshop designed to train others to facilitate their own groups of families, National Guard soldier Thad Shunkwiler from Mankato said that while all parents experience stress, military parents face more challenges in dealing with children’s emotions — because soldiers are trained to not let emotions interfere.

“All of your training in the military is to react — react, react, react, react, react — not respond, not think about it — it’s to react,” Shunkwiler said.

Researchers plan to recruit the first 100 families by summer. If successful, hope to expand it to other military families in Minnesota and nationwide.