THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, December 10, 1995 TAG: 9512080624
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY CHRISTOPHER O'KENNON
LENGTH: Medium: 91 lines
A version of this piece appeared in Style Weekly.Many children face a bogyman more dangerous than anything drooling under the bed and more insidious than the Wild Things hiding in their closets among the faded jeans and little yellow raincoats. They don't choose this adversary, yet it often thunders over their young lives with the impartial effectiveness of a tidal wave.
It's the military, and it does a serious number on children.
In my line of work, I do damage control with other people's children. By the time I meet them, they're usually well on the road to perpetual dysfunction. But many of them share one important characteristic: The military paved the road.
A significant number of the adolescent patients in local residential psychiatric programs are ``military brats,'' the children of military families. Army, Air Force, Navy, Marines; it doesn't seem to be important which branch of the service they come from.
The U.S. military is well aware of this problem and has been taking steps to combat it. And to give them credit, they probably do a better job of handling such problems as child abuse than the civil sector.
Here's what happens when a charge of child abuse, for example, is levied against a Marine: The social workers make a recommendation as to how the situation should be handled and what the family has to do. Their recommendation is channeled through the commanding officer and becomes an order. The Marine's battalion commander can easily order the soldier to stay away from his family. (This order amounts to the revocation of a Marine's privilege to go home at the end of the day to be with his family.) The child is removed from danger and things progress from there.
But what if the child isn't really being abused? If the social worker is convinced otherwise, the chain of events still occurs, along with a possible blot on the Marine's service record. (There is no guarantee of confidentiality as there is in the private sector.)
I can no longer count the number of teenagers I've worked with who have discovered this makes for a very powerful weapon against their parents. If they don't get their way, or their father attempts to discipline them, they stroll over to the the Family Services Center (or somewhere similar) and cry on the social worker's shoulder. Who can take the chance they're lying?
In addition to the overt manipulation of the system, an even worse problem occurs with the frequent moving around that the military families take as a part of life. Growing up is difficult enough without having to worry about stability.
Military brats don't have the option of putting down roots everywhere they go; they have to settle for vines. The everyday question of ``Where are you from?'' becomes a tired obstacle in initial conversations.
This creates kids with dysfunctional social systems, and a lot can ooze from such a world view. Most military brats spend their lives moving from one superficial relationship to another. They've learned that you can't be let down or hurt by friends if you never develop a truly meaningful relationship. For some this becomes merely a character flaw. For others, it develops into a barrier forever between them and happiness because the human psyche does not take it well when you intentionally isolate it from others.
The military brat becomes safe from the emotional pain of uprooting and moving away from friends but is left instead with a void too frightening to fill.
Problems with commitment can bleed over into accountability. If you don't have any plans to stick around long enough to feel the repercussions of your actions, why not do whatever you feel like doing? Impulse control problems blossom, especially in already defiant teenagers in exceptionally authoritarian families.
The problem of constant mobility isn't peculiar to the military. Children of some corporate executives and those of foreign service personnel all know the perpetual status of the outsider. But it seems the military has the distinction of combining it with authoritarianism and the frequent threat that one's parents could be killed.
Certainly the military can have positive effects on children. Military brats tend to be especially resilient, being used to constantly changing situations, and can balance easily on the social tightrope when they try. They also possess a willingness to take risks, but this can also get them in trouble.
In essence, when things go wrong - as they often do in adolescence - more problems are already waiting just below the surface. They take the same shape, at least enough to be more than coincidence. Impulse control, oppositional defiant disorders and depression top out the common colds of military brats in psychiatric institutions.
It would be nice if we didn't need soldiers anymore, and it would be equally nice if we didn't need mental health professionals. But we can at least try to address the problems that we might be able to fix. Is the military really the place for families? For children? I know psychiatric hospitals shouldn't be. MEMO: Christopher O'Kennon is a mental health worker at Poplar Springs
Hospital in Chester, Va. by CNB