From the NFRW Armed Services Committee
By CAPT (ret) Mary Smart, Hawaii
April has been designated as the Month of the Military child since the mid 1980’s. It is the special time to recognize the sacrifices made due to deploying parents and frequent moves to new locations, sometimes to foreign lands, requiring the leaving of school and friends because of their parent’s military commitments. The Department of Defense Education Activity, which operates 160 schools from K through 12 students in seven states, Guam, Puerto Rico, and eleven foreign countries are available to children of military families and sometimes these students will attend public, private, or home school in their new residential communities. Flexibility and resiliency are essential to their continued academic success.
Often military children are born when one parent is on extended deployments and meet for the first-time months after the child’s birth. Often there is little time to develop the parent child relationship especially when both parents are active duty members and deploy simultaneously. To assist parents in their bonding with new members of their family, the Department of Defense announced a new military parental leave program using Directive-type Memorandum 23-001 which authorized 12 weeks of parental leave following the birth, adoption, or fostering of a new family member. The Air Force and Space Force have issued their implementing policies but the other Services are still developing their changes that will take effect in the future.
To recognize the outstanding achievements of our military children, the Military Child of the Year Award has been established by Operation Homefront. Young men and women from ages 13 to 18 are eligible for this award based on their scholarship, volunteerism, leadership, extracurricular involvement and other criteria while facing the challenges of military family life. The submissions for 2023 are closed and the winners will be flown with a parent or guardian to Washington D.C. to attend a gala and be presented with $10,000 each, a laptop computer and other donated gifts. Since this has been an annual program for fifteen years, it is never too late to think about preparing for a 2024 submission.