The Demographics of Military Children and Families
The Demographics of Military Children and Families
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DOI：
10.1353/foc.2013.0018
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发表时间：
2013-09-01
影响因子：
--
通讯作者：
Segal, David R.
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
Clever, Molly;Segal, David R.
自从20世纪70年代全志愿军出现以来，婚姻、为人父母和家庭生活在美国已经变得司空见惯。S.军人配偶和子女的比例现在是1.4比1。莫莉·克莱弗和大卫·R.西格尔发现了几个区别当今军人家庭的趋势。例如，与平民相比，军人结婚更早，组建家庭更早。由于工作的需要，他们比平民更频繁地迁移，而且他们常常一次与家人分离数月。尽管自20世纪70年代以来，女性服役的比例稳步上升，但军队中仍以男性为主，这意味着大多数军人父母都是父亲。尽管有这些明显的趋势，但Clever和Segal的主要发现是，军人家庭不能被整齐地归类。相反，他们是一个具有不同需求的惊人的多样化人口。在军队内部，人口群体在重要方面存在差异，各军种也各不相同。军人家庭本身有多种形式，不仅包括平民生活中常见的双亲家庭、单亲家庭等，而且还包括军人特有的父母都是军人的双重服务家庭。此外，军人家庭的需求随着时间的推移而变化，因为他们经历了个人和军事过渡。因此，帮助军人家庭和儿童的最佳政策和方案是灵活和可适应的，而不是僵化的。
Since the advent of the all-volunteer force in the 1970s, marriage, parenthood, and family life have become commonplace in the U. S. military among enlisted personnel and officers alike, and military spouses and children now outnumber service members by a ratio of 1.4 to 1. Reviewing data from the government and from academic and nonacademic research, Molly Clever and David R. Segal find several trends that distinguish today's military families. Compared with civilians, for example, service members marry younger and start families earlier. Because of the requirements of their jobs, they move much more frequently than civilians do, and they are often separated from their families for months at a time. And despite steady increases since the 1970s in the percentage of women who serve, the armed forces are still overwhelmingly male, meaning that the majority of military parents are fathers.Despite these distinguishing trends, Clever and Segal's chief finding is that military families cannot be neatly pigeonholed. Instead, they are a strikingly diverse population with diverse needs. Within the military, demographic groups differ in important ways, and the service branches differ from one another as well. Military families themselves come in many forms, including not only the categories familiar from civilian life-two-parent, single-parent, and so on-but also, unique to the military, dual-service families in which both parents are service members. Moreover, military families' needs change over time as they move through personal and military transitions. Thus the best policies and programs to help military families and children are flexible and adaptable rather than rigidly structured.