Parenting During Deployment

A wise person once said: "Raising kids is like trying to nail jello to a tree!"

I think we can all agree parenting isn’t always easy, even in the most ideal circumstances. Deployment can add additional stress to couples in regards to their roles as parents.

Deployment also takes a toll on children, who may feel many intense and even foreign emotions.

Emotion Coaching (introduced by Dr. John Gottman) is a way to help your children recognize, process, accept, and appropriately deal with their feelings. Though emotion coaching is not specifically geared toward parents facing deployment, it can foster connection between parents and children, especially in times of family stress like deployment, frequent re-location, and many other stressors facing military families, as addressed in the first two lessons.

Pre-Step 1 - Recognizing your emotions, and learning to accept them. We can’t help our children identify and process their emotions if we’re not in tune with our own.

This is especially important during periods of stress and even crisis in the family.

Sometimes it can be difficult to understand what we are feeling. This “emotion wheel” helps identify secondary and primary emotions, as well as related emotions.

Clicking the picture below will allow you to print a copy of this chart. To find out more about this emotion wheel click on this link: The Mighty.com

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Emotion Coaching

Step 1: Recognizing your child’s emotions and fostering empathy

Step 2: Recognizing expressions of emotion as opportunities for teaching, connection, and intimacy

Click on the bold numbers by the Emotion Coaching Steps for links to The Gottman Institute Blogs for more in-depth information.

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Step 3: Using empathetic listening and validation as your child shares emotions

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Step 4: Helping your child identify and label emotions

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Step 5: Helping your child brainstorm problem solving ideas and help them set limits

To the right is another useful link to help parents implement emotion coaching techniques from Parenting Counts.

Communication

The Institute for Family Studies published a blog article entitled

“The Intimate Parent” - found here →

where they highlighted one principle that

fosters intimacy between parents and children:

open parent-child communication

Communication is obviously limited during times of deployment, but don’t worry. Good communication is about quality, and sometimes consistency, not necessarily quantity.

Interacting with children in a way that helps keep communication lines open can include (but is not limited to) the following:

Giving your child reasonable explanations for rules and consequences
Involving children in decision-making where appropriate
Allowing children’s thoughts, feelings, and ideas to be heard
Listening and responding with empathy
Making expectations clear and known

Now, you may be thinking:

“These can help parents in any situation, any tips specifically for those trying to parent during deployment?”

Click on the icon below for a link to the article -

“10 Tips for Parenting While Your Spouse Is Deployed”