There’s no question that military life can be stressful for all members of military families, including young children. Child care providers working with children from military families need to recognize that living in a military family has emotional ups and downs and find ways to help children cope with the stresses of military family life. The first step in helping children manage their stress is to understand how and why children in military families experience stress.
Children’s books are such a great way to help children deal with change – and military life certainly has plenty of that! Here are some books that can help young children deal with different changes that may occur in their families. The books in bold have a specific military theme and include characters in military families. Others are recommended because of how well they deal with emotions from a child’s perspective. Even though the situation doesn’t involve a military element, …
Being “the new kid on the block” is a feeling many of us can relate to. Being in a new environment can be emotionally challenging. Leaving home, friends, and all that’s familiar to relocate to a completely new community is especially hard, even for the most adaptable children. If you work with military families, you know that relocation, or PCS (Permanent Change of Station), can be a very common experience. With each move, parents and children experience the discomfort of …
Child care providers know that if there’s one thing about military family life that’s predictable, it’s that it is unpredictable! Change happens. A lot. These changes usually affect children from military families in very significant ways that they neither control nor fully understand. Whether it’s a parent going far away or the return of parent, or a move to whole new place – the impact is enormous. Coping with such significant change is a monumental task for very young children. …
As a child care provider, you know the importance of familiar routines for young children. They like to know when and what to expect. This is especially true for military children. Every child experiences changes as part of normal life. But as someone who provides child care for military families, you know that the changes common to military children are super-sized:
Three-year-old Derrick thinks about his daddy a lot. Maggie, his teacher, can tell because nearly every day she sees him pretending to be a soldier. When his dad’s National Guard unit was getting ready to deploy to Afghanistan earlier in the year, Derrick would act out packing a suitcase, saying goodbye to his pretend family, and getting all his gear ready to “go to work” – gear that included a helmet and a gun. When his dad was injured in …
As Maggie surveys her active 3-year-olds on the playground, she notices one of the boys pointing a toy shovel like a gun out the window of the play structure. “Derrick!” she says as she comes closer, “you know we don’t play with guns at school. Find something else to play.”
This is a situation that plays itself out over and over in child care programs. Many child care providers are uncomfortable with children pretending to use weapons and want to …
The separation of deployment is hard on everyone in a military family. But it’s especially difficult for families with young children because young children don’t understand or, worse yet, misunderstand the circumstances surrounding the separation. Deployment is difficult for the deployed parent because young children, especially infants and toddlers, grow and change so much in such a short period of time. Missing this exciting period of growth contributes to feelings of being disconnected and fears that the parent won’t …
Learning self-control is an ongoing process in each child’s development. Child care providers can play an important role in encouraging children to develop self-control through interactions, appropriate guidance, and child-directed activities. When encouraging children’s self-control, child care providers need to be sure their expectations are appropriate and realistic for the particular child. The child’s age can be an indicator of what to expect, but children of the same age can be at different developmental levels. Be sure to consider the …
Young children need help and support to understand death and other losses. Helping a young child deal with loss and grief is one of the most difficult responsibilities a child care provider may face. Young children do feel grief when they lose someone or something special to them. Most adults recognize that children experience grief at the death of a loved one — including a family member, a friend, or even a pet.
But children also experience grief during other …
