Introduction to Sociology: Analysis on Military Family Problems (Essay Sample)

Term project
Introduction to Sociology (Soc.1)
TOPIC: Military Family Problems
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Spring 2
Introduction
The reason why I wanted to do military family problems was that after serving in the United States Army for 11 years I look back on all of my past experience and find many of the problems that military families endure disturbing. I find that soldiers who are willing to lay down their lives or even give the ultimate sacrifice for their country, don’t seem to get paid as well as they should. The average Sargent in the Army which is an equivalent to a managerial position gets paid around $40,000 to $45,000 dollars a year that is not including benefits. With benefits included comes out to probably $60,000 a year. Comparing this to what the average federal government worker in the same manger position would be making $60,000 with benefits. These federal employees are making more than the average Sargent who does more for this country and is willing to sacrifice their lives if necessary. Federal employees, on the other hand, do less work and get paid more and probably could be replaced with a soldier who could do their jobs for less. If a soldier has a family of four and is expected to live off of $40,000 a year even with benefits, it is going to be a difficult hardship for them. The entire family can feel the financial burden. It will not be as bad with a family of two but both are still going to get paid about the same amount even if one has more dependents. This inequality can be seen throughout all branches of the military.
Another issue I found is all the moving around military personnel has to do. This becomes an even bigger problem when kids are involved. Being in the military I moved around many times. From South Korea to Hawaii to Iraq and back to Hawaii. Then go back to South Korea and finally end up in Arizona. Each time having to move was a task to pack up and set up appointment dates for your house to be moved from one location to another. Then ship your car and get tickets to fly across the ocean and set up a new home. This gets tiring doing this over and over again. It puts stress on the family and having to say goodbye to friends after finally getting settled in, creates even more stress. Then the cycle of making new friends and finding out whom you can trust, who you can’t trust begins all over again. This is especially difficult for children and even harder for teens trying to find themselves. Then there are the deployments of breaking up families so military personnel can go move to another country and fight in a war. Stress accumulates for all family members as they wait for loved ones to return or to return to loved ones back home. This includes the stress that families feel of death and never seeing their loved one again. These problems have been occurring since 1941 during the World War II and are still occurring today. Many people may not find stress to be a problem but when it is a stress that is consistently bombarding a person and wears them down, it can get unbelievably unbearable to the point of causing depression and having family members seek mental health professionals.
Review of Literature
Mr. Black in his 1993 article“Military-Induced Family Separation: A Stress Reduction Intervention”, he highlights some of the unique stressors faced by active-duty, national guard, and reserve military families.
* Life stressors faced by military families include frequent moves, the potential of being deployed into hostile environments, frequent periods of family separation, geographic isolation from extended-family support systems, low pay, young age as compared to the general civilian population, and a high incidence of young children living in the home.
* Another Stressor military families must live with is the threat that their loved ones may be killed or wounded in combat or military accidents.
* Each stressor might be adequately handled by families when dealt with separately, but military families often must deal with them as an aggregate.
* Stressor pileup places military families at high risk of experiencing crises.
Mrs. Russo and Mrs. Moira in their 2015 article “Coping with Stress: supporting the Needs of Military Families and Their Children” found that families in the military, stress occurs regularly due to factors such as reassignments, deployments, and the frequency of changes.
* Stressors can be particularly difficult for children who are learning to adjust to the military lifestyle
* Military Spouses have ranked separation due to military assignment, training, or deployment as their major stressors and dissatisfaction with the military.
* These stressor issues may, in turn, cause a negative impact on the child or children in the family.
Discussion
Military families are subject to numerous stressing problems that need an effective revamping of the system in order to spur their nature of lives, as well as their profession. In this section, the paper presents an exhaustive discussion on the causes of stresses and other related difficulties surrounding military families and subsequently providing possible solutions to the problems. The section also includes formidable adaptive mechanisms to the stressful condition of the military lifestyle. Russo and Fallon discovered that the major contributing factors of stress in the military households include ranks, duration of a given military service, frequency and nature of military assignments, time intervals of military deployments, and repetitiveness of military deployment (408). In addition, low pay and hostile environments where military obligations are to be conducted pose lots of stress to members of the military households (Black 273).
With regards to the aforementioned elements, their associations largely influence the resiliency and adaptation that members of the military families need to command for the purpose of countering related challenges (Russo & Fallon 408). In spite of resiliency, Russo and Fallon continue to posit that these stressors have very grave consequences (408, par. 2). For instance, the combination of variables such as military training, assignments, and deployments has resulted in the separation between spouses (Russo & Fallon 408). Black discovered that a combination of such elements creates geographical isolation between and among family members especially spouses (273, par. 5). In this respect, most spouses outline that military shows no or little concern regarding their well-being. Moreover, these military tasks elevate loneliness and hence, resulting in a system of families devoid of companionship. Other vital family matters such as sharing financial opinions, decision making, and appropriate measures of disciplining children are hindered.
Furthermore, Russo and Fallon assert that frequent shifting from one region to another in conjunction with long and irregular working hours have formed lots of stress to military families (408). In this regard, children in these families find this concept of unanticipated lifestyle difficult to manage since the events necessitate rapid adjustments to the demands of the new occurrences. According to the statistics, forty-four percent of the members in the active military operations have children, which amount to at least one million school going children of which some are adolescents (Russo & Fallon 408, par. 6). Therefore, most children that belong to these military families are compelled to learn on ways to survive with regards to the demands that military life seeks to satisfy. Such a series of changes is not supportive of the growth of children.Russo and Fallon underscore that there are increased negative consequences on children of military spouses in their self-concept, academic performances, and peer relationships (409). In this particular spectrum, they affirm that the multiple and lengthy deployments of military parents cause anxiety, depression, and uncertainties amongst children (Russo & Fallon 409, par. 2).
Military families face challenges in raising disabled children since these children require a lot of attention. Russo and Fallon point out that whether one parent or both are military parents, it is stressful to bring up a child with disability because of the constant requirement for care, supervision requirements, treatment costs, as well as the emergence of numerous sentiments such as embarrassment, despair, anger, and guilt (408, par. 4). In the case where one parent is in the military, the other is left behind to take care of all these demands in the event of deployment, which appears challenging and stressful. It is imperative to note that with the aforementioned challenges that military families are subject to, the concept of parenting a disabled child might pose a lot more threats when coupled with those challenges.
With regards to these challenges, it is significant to concoct ways that could help these families in overcoming them for the purpose of improving their overall well-being. Black outlines that there is a dire need to invent guidelines that are of benefit to military spouses in lessening military family-related stresses and difficulties (276). In their works, they accentuate that support groups need to be initiated in which spouses should take the lead (276, par. 2; Russo & Fallon 410). Black asserts that support groups create the right foundation of intervening military family-related stresses and therefore, aiding spouses in combating challenges that emanate from separations that are military induced (276). Black maintains that support groups are helpful to most wives because they prefer them to formal services that are headed by professionals due to stigma (par. 2).
With regard to these groups, it is essential to ensure that the manner in w...