MILITARY CULTURE
Additional Trainings and Educational Resources
From the War Zone to the Home Front: FREE, one-hour clinically accredited education sessions available free and on demand.
Talking with Children
Talking with children about a parent’s upcoming Military deployment or homecoming can be challenging. If something troubling about the Military is covered widely in the news, it is difficult to know how to talk about it. At Home Base, we like to say, “for every one warrior, there are ten worriers.” Depending on a child’s age or life experience, a parent’s absence and return can be cause for great joy—or stress. Family routines are changed and so is communication.
The Family Support Team at Home Base has experience in working with children and families as family relationships and routines change. We’ve prepared three tools to help parents talk with children during these challenging times:
The Toolkit for the Well-Child Screening of Military Children and an accompanying waiting are designed to help pediatricians and other primary care providers identify and address the signs of post-traumatic stress among children and families. Development of the toolkit was led by Home Base’s Paula Rauch, MD, and Bonnie Ohye, MD, and was generously funded by the William P. Anderson Foundation.
The Tool Kit was developed by Home Base in collaboration with the Massachusetts Child Psychiatry Access Project (McPAP). Home Base and McPAP have distributed the toolkit to more than 400 primary care practices which provide care for 1.5 million children in Massachusetts. The toolkit has received state and nationwide attention through the Military Child Education Coalition, and a wide range of government and non–profit child–serving organizations, as well as The Boston Globe.
Staying Strong for Parents
Staying Strong offers the Military Parent a choice of 16 videos covering stages of child development, the role of temperament, parent guidance, related family activities, and eight true-to-life stories of parenting children of different ages and temperaments through key challenges in families that serve. An on-line forum encourages both questions and conversation.
