Multiple adjustment difficulties have been associated with exposure to recent parental deployments among the 2 million children whose military parents have been deployed since 2001. Exposures to parental wartime deployments also may have long-term consequences for children, but these have not yet been systematically studied. The consequences of early exposures may be particularly evident around adolescence, when young people make decisions that are highly consequential for their later functioning. The proposed study will assess the direct and indirect effects of early exposures to parental deployments and later youth adjustment. Parents’ psychological health and family processes will be examined as mediators, and parents’ and children’s vulnerability and support will also be examined as factors that could modulate relationships between parental deployment and youth adjustment. Archival data including demographic, deployment, and medical records will be combined with new data gathered from two children and up to two parents in 513 families where children will be aged 11 to 16 at the launch of data collection. Children will have experienced at least one parental deployment lasting at least 30 days, at least one child prior to age 6. Data will be gathered via interviews, surveys, and observation of family interaction tasks conducted during home visits. Outcomes will be indicators of children’s social-emotional development, behavior, and academic performance. Analyses will examine variability both within and between families over time, taking into account the dependent nature of within-family data. Innovative features of this study are that it will include participants who have left military service as well as those who continue to serve. Siblings of focal children also will be included so that deployment effects can be separated from child specific factors. We expect to find less positive adjustment among youth whose exposures began earlier, were more frequent or prolonged, and/or who were exposed to deployments where parents’ experiences were more traumatic. We expect that these effects will operate through parents’ psychological health, parenting efficacy, relationship quality, and family functioning, and that they will be stronger in the presence of greater vulnerability and less support. This study will expand knowledge about children’s risk and resilience in families, and has potentially important implications for schools, community organizations and health care providers. In less than a decade the children born during the longest war in our nation’s history will have moved beyond adolescence and it will no longer be possible to measure the impact of early exposure to parental combat deployment on youth adjustment.

In the past 15 years, 2 million children have been exposed to parental wartime deployment, an adverse experience with the potential to disrupt individual development and family functioning. These children have begun to enter adolescence and are moving beyond the reach of military or veteran systems of care into civilian educational, health, and community settings. There is an urgent public health need to understand the long-term consequences of early exposures to parental wartime deployment on the later social, behavioral, and academic functioning of youth.