Military Parents’ Stress Exposure Associated with Mental and Behavioral Health Outcomes among Their Young Children

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PROJECT SUMMARY/ABSTRACT: Although many military families cope successfully with wartime military service, mounting empirical evidence suggests that a sizeable subset of military-connected children may experience negative consequences, including mental health problems, substance use, and suicidality. Prior research has demonstrated an association between parental deployment and these outcomes, but military-specific stressors alone do not adequately explain the risk for poor adjustment among nearly 2 million military-connected youth. This knowledge gap suggests the need to examine a broader spectrum of psychosocial stressors to better explain adverse mental and behavioral health outcomes in this vulnerable sub-population. The present study employs a novel, family- level stress process lens to consider various mechanisms through which early, chronic, and recent non-military stressors may combine with military stressors to influence the mental health of military parents and more completely explain risk for adverse mental and behavioral health outcomes among young military-connected children. We use secondary data from the Department of Defense’s (DoD) Millennium Cohort Family Study (MCFS), a longitudinal survey of 9,872 married military couples. The MCFS project and linked archival DoD datasets offer a unique opportunity to explore family-level stress processes, including stress proliferation, stress sensitization, muting of psychosocial resources, and lateral proliferation of stress. Dyadic baseline data includes measures of service member’s (SM) and spouses’ early, chronic, and recent non-military stressors (e.g., maltreatment in childhood, stress related to racial/ethnic minority status, and recent traumatic life events), military stressors (e.g., deployment), psychosocial resources like coping, and mental health. Data collected at 3-year follow-up include parent-reported and objective measures of child mental and behavioral health. Using structural equation modeling, we will explore the dyadic effects of non-military and military stressors on the mental health of each parent and their partner. Further, we will explore whether each parents’ early stress exposure and psychosocial resources affect the relationship between recent stressors and their own and their partner’s mental health. Finally, we will explore the relationship between parents’ stress exposure and children’s risk for poor mental and behavioral health outcomes, considering the role of parents’ mental health as a mediator, as well as differential effects for children of different ages and genders. Findings will lead to increased understanding of the lateral proliferation of stress processes among members of a family system. Further, consistent with newer approaches to health promotion, understanding these relationships will inform targeted prevention and intervention efforts to reduce risk associated with exposure to toxic stress in young military children, support healthy family functioning, and improve developmental outcomes for these youth and their families.