This text introduces readers to military families, their resilience, and the challenges of military life. Personal stories from active duty, National Guard, reservists, veterans, and their families, from all branches and ranks of the military, and those who work with military personnel, bring their experiences to life. A review of the latest research, theories, policies, and programs better prepares readers for working with military families. Objectives, key terms, tables, figures, summaries, and exercises, including web based exercises, serve as a chapter review. The book concludes with a glossary of key terms. Engaging vignettes are featured throughout: · Voices from the Frontline offer personal accounts of issues faced by actual program leaders, practitioners, researchers, policy makers, service members, and their families. · Spotlight on Research highlights the latest studies on dealing with combat related issues. · Best Practices review the optimal strategies used in the field. · Tips from the Frontline offer suggestions from experienced personnel. The book opens with an introduction to military culture and family life. Joining the military and why people do so are explored in chapter 2. Next, life in the military including relocation, employment, education, and deployment are examined. Daily lives of children in military families are explored in chapter 4. How stress and resilience theories are used in working with military families are then reviewed. Chapter 6 focuses on milestones experienced by service members and programs that support them through these transitions. Everyday issues caused by the trauma of war are reviewed in Chapters 7 and 8. Programs, policies, and organizations that serve military families in dealing with deployment, education, and health and child care are explored in chapters 9 and 10 followed by initiatives supporting reintegration and reunification issues. Next, how to work with families and those who have experienced traumatic events is considered. The book concludes with a review of career opportunities and stories from working professionals. Intended as a text for advanced undergraduate or graduate courses on military families or as a supplement for courses on the family, marriage and family, stress and coping, or family systems taught in family studies, human development, clinical or counseling psychology, sociology, social work, and nursing, this book also appeals to helping professionals who work with military families.

This text introduces readers to the unique culture of military families, their resilience, and the challenges of military life. Personal stories from nearly 70 active duty, reservists, veterans, and their families from all branches and ranks of the military bring their experiences to life. A review of the latest research, theories, policies, and programs better prepares readers for understanding and working with military families. Objectives, key terms, tables, figures, summaries, and exercises, including web based exercises, serve as a chapter review. The book concludes with a glossary. Readers learn about diverse careers within which they can make important differences for families. Engaging vignettes are featured throughout: Voices from the Frontline offer personal accounts of issues faced by actual program leaders, practitioners, researchers, policy makers, service members, veterans, and their families. Spotlight on Research highlights the latest studies on dealing with combat related issues. Best Practices review the optimal strategies used in the field. Tips from the Frontline offer suggestions from experienced personnel. Updated throughout including the latest demographic data, the new edition also features: -New chapter (9) on women service members that addresses the accomplishments and challenges faced by this population including sexual bias and assault, and combat-related psychological disorders. - New chapter (10) on veterans and families looks at veterans by era (e.g.WW2), each era’s signature issues and how those impact programs and policies, and challenges veterans may face such as employment, education, and mental and physical health issues. -Two new more comprehensive and cohesive chapters (11 & 12) review military and civilian programs, policies, and organizations that support military and veteran families. -Additional information on TBI and PTSD, the deployment cycle, stress and resilience, the possible negative effects of military life on families, same-sex couples and their children, and the recent increase in suicides in the military. -More applied cases and exercises that focus on providing services to military families. Intended as a text for advanced undergraduate or graduate courses on military families or as a supplement for courses on the family, marriage and family, stress and coping, or family systems taught in family science, human development, clinical or counseling psychology, sociology, social work, and nursing, this book also appeals to helping professionals who work with military and veteran families.

This book focuses on the key issues that affect military families when soldiers are deployed overseas, focusing on the support given to military personnel and families before, during and after missions. Today’s postmodern armies are expected to provide social-psychological support both to their personnel in military operations abroad and to their families at home. Since the end of the Cold War and even more so after 9/11, separations between military personnel and their families have become more frequent as there has been a multitude of missions carried out by multinational task forces all over the world. The book focuses on three central questions affecting military families. First, how do changing missions and tasks of the military affect soldiers and families? Second, what is the effect of deployments on the ones left behind? Third, what is the national structure of family support systems and its evolution? The book employs a multidisciplinary approach, with contributions from psychology, sociology, history, anthropology and others. In addition, it covers all the services, Army, Navy/Marines, Air Force, spanning a wide range of countries, including UK, USA, Belgium, Turkey, Australia and Japan. At the same time it takes a multitude of perspectives such as the theoretical, empirical, reflective, life events (narrative) approach, national and the global, and uses approaches from different disciplines and perspectives, combining them to produce a volume that enhances our knowledge and understanding of military families. This book will be of much interest to students of military studies, sociology, war and conflict studies and IR/political science in general.

The U.S. military has been continuously engaged in foreign conflicts for over two decades. The strains that these deployments, the associated increases in operational tempo, and the general challenges of military life affect not only service members but also the people who depend on them and who support them as they support the nation â€" their families. Family members provide support to service members while they serve or when they have difficulties; family problems can interfere with the ability of service members to deploy or remain in theater; and family members are central influences on whether members continue to serve. In addition, rising family diversity and complexity will likely increase the difficulty of creating military policies, programs and practices that adequately support families in the performance of military duties. Strengthening the Military Family Readiness System for a Changing American Society examines the challenges and opportunities facing military families and what is known about effective strategies for supporting and protecting military children and families, as well as lessons to be learned from these experiences. This report offers recommendations regarding what is needed to strengthen the support system for military families.

How does the military really work? What issues are constants for military families, and what special stresses do they face? Counseling Military Families provides the best available overview of military life, including demographic information and examples of military family issues. Chapters focus on vital issues such as the unique circumstances of reservists, career service personnel, spouses, and children, and present treatment models and targeted interventions tailored for use with military families. Counseling Military Families provides clinicians with the tools they need to make a difference in the lives of families in transition, including those who may have an ingrained resistance to asking for help and who may be available for counseling for a relatively short period of time.

This volume presents a fresh look at the military spouses in Shakespeare’s Othello, 1 Henry IV, Julius Caesar, Troilus and Cressida, Macbeth, and Coriolanus, vital to understanding the plays themselves. By analysing the characters as military spouses, we can better understand current dynamics in modern American civilian and military culture as modern American military spouses live through the War on Terror. Shakespeare's Military Spouses and Twenty-First-Century Warfare explains what these plays have to say about the role of military families and cultural constructions of masculinity both in the texts themselves and in modern America. Concerns relevant to today’s military families – domestic violence, PTSD, infertility, the treatment of queer servicemembers, war crimes, and the growing civil-military divide – pervade Shakespeare’s works. These parallels to the contemporary lived experience are brought out through reference to memoirs written by modern-day military spouses, sociological studies of the American armed forces, and reports issued by the Department of Defence. Shakespeare’s military spouses create a discourse that recognizes the role of the military in national defence but criticizes risky or damaging behaviours and norms, promoting the idea of a martial identity that permits military defence without the dangers of toxic masculinity. Meeting at the intersection of Shakespeare Studies, trauma studies, and military studies, this focus on military spouses is a unique and unprecedented resource for academics in these fields, as well as for groups interested in Shakespeare and theatre as a way of thinking through and responding to psychiatric issues and traumatic experiences.

Clinical Military Counseling provides current research and ethical practice guidelines for the assessment, diagnosis, and mental health treatment of active-duty service members, veterans, and military families in a 21st-century multicultural environment. Author Mark Stebnicki discusses contemporary military culture; the medical and psychosocial aspects of military health, including the neuroscience of military stress and trauma; suicide; chronic illnesses and disability; and blast and traumatic brain injuries. In addition, he offers integrative approaches to healing the mind, body, and spirit of service members and veterans dealing with clinical issues, such as spirituality, moral injury, and trauma; complex posttraumatic stress disorder and co-occurring mental health conditions; the stresses of the deployment cycle; and military career transitions. *Requests for digital versions from ACA can be found on www.wiley.com. *To purchase print copies, please visit the ACA website *Reproduction requests for material from books published by ACA should be directed to [email protected]

"This book, written by members of the Chief of Staff of the Army's Strategic Studies Group, takes an innovative approach to determining how the United States can counter extremist groups and engage in great power competition in the twenty first century. After proposing that the answer lies in switching the focus of current US strategy from the physical domain on which conflict occurs to the social, political, and cultural networks that comprise the human domain in which it occurs, it develops a new operating concept for conducting operations within that domain. This is an important book for those in security studies and international relations."--Provided by publisher.

Nearly 1.9 million U.S. troops have been deployed to Afghanistan and Iraq since October 2001. Many service members and veterans face serious challenges in readjusting to normal life after returning home. This initial book presents findings on the most critical challenges, and lays out the blueprint for the second phase of the study to determine how best to meet the needs of returning troops and their families.