After 10 years of war, it’s important to remember that not all of the wounded are on the battlefield. The Rand Corp. has just issued a disturbing report on the impact of the nation’s wars on the littlest soldiers after following more than 1,000 military families for more than a year:
We found that youth in our study were experiencing relatively high levels of emotional or behavioral difficulties. Overall, 30 percent of caregivers in the study at baseline reported moderate-to-high levels of emotional or behavioral difficulties among their children. At the 6-month and 12-month interviews, caregiver reports of youth difficulties decreased on average (compared with what these average scores were at baseline), but nearly 30 percent of caregivers in the study still reported difficulties in the moderate-to-high range. Among caregivers of youth 11–14 years, 34 percent in our study sample reported elevated emotional or behavioral problems compared with only 19 percent of youth this age in the general population…
Approximately 44 percent of youth in the study reported difficulties in the moderate-to-high range at baseline; this dropped to an average of 38 percent at 6 and 12 months…We found that youth in our study sample reported experiencing anxiety symptoms at levels that were higher than the average observed in other studies of youth. Thirty percent of the youth in our study reported elevated anxiety symptom levels, compared with 15 percent of youth in civilian studies.
Rand researchers say there is a need to follow military children for more than a year to see if these effects wane with time. So there are plans for the federal government to pay Rand for a “Deployment Life Study” that will follow military families for three years to see if they’ve snapped out of it.