Understanding Military Families and the Veteran’s Role as a Parent: Evaluating Parental Concerns About their Children’s Health and Wellbeing

Overview

Deployment is widely known to be a stressful challenge for all members of military families. This stress is felt by parents and children alike although pressures and challenges are different depending on position in the family structure.1 Not surprisingly, military deployment has been associated with serious mental and physical health concerns in veterans and their family members leading to increased burden on the family and increased medical expenses. Some of these burdens include treatment for chronic disease, use of mental health services, substance use and abuse, suicide, lower marital satisfaction and divorce, child mistreatment, and emotional, behavioral, and educational problems among children.2-4 Previous research has largely focused on trauma exposure and psychological stress of military life; however recent work has shown that deployment related exposures to airborne hazards and burn pits is associated with clinically significant chronic health concern namely respiratory illness. 5,6 In addition to risk for the veteran, studies suggest that parental exposures may be passed to off spring resulting in developmental and chronic health conditions in children.7,8 One study suggested no impact on rates of birth defects in parental exposures on rates of birth defect rates in those exposed to burn pits.9 However, this study focused only on burn pit exposure which is only one component of deployment related exposure and the outcomes relied on extreme phenotypes (birth defects) which are often incompatible with life or severely disabling. Tanwar et al demonstrated that preconception exposure to fine particulate matter lead to increased risk of cardiac dysfunction, a less severe phenotype than birth defect.8 This is consistent with studies evaluating other prenatal exposures. Prominently, the effects of parental obesity on offspring report significant impact on offspring metabolic function and gene expression.10,11 These data suggest that the health of the children could be impacted in clinically significant albeit less seriously than a frank birth defect. However more research focused on evaluating the impact of veteran exposure to airborne hazards and burn pits on the health and wellness of their children.