Education Week 4-20-2011 Reflection

Parents' Deployment Found To Exact a Toll on Students' Learning:  Let me begin by saying that I am a military brat.  That is the common term for people who are the son or daughter of someone in any branch of the US Armed Forces.  Since my father was in the Army, my older brother was born in Florida, I was born in California, and my younger brother was born in Florida after moving back there, and then we moved to Washington.  Since I was only four years old, I don't remember what it was like to move from place to place and have to "start all over" as many kids and families often do when them move to the other side of the country to where they don't know anyone.  I was lucky enough to stay in the same place to go to one elementary school, one junior high school, and one high school.  Some kids go through a heck of a lot more than that.  They go through YEARS without seeing one or both of their parents.  One of my earliest memories is sitting on my mom's lap at the computer looking at a blue screen as she would type the words I was saying in a letter to my dad while he was on a six month long cruise on the USS Nimitz.  Six months isn't much compared to twelve or fifteen months.  I would argue that it was much easier to get through the time my dad was away during that six month cruise on the Nimitz than it was when he was gone for eight months getting trained to become a teacher in Georgia.  I was in seventh grade at that time and it was very difficult for me as a 12 year old to be without my dad.  People say that the most formative years of a child's life is when they are a toddler to eight years old.  My thinking is that a kid is growing up to be the person they are going to be the rest of their life from about age eleven or twelve years old onward.  Not having either a father or a mother figure in your life is potentially going to give the child a skewed upbringing.  What I mean by skewed upbringing is that more often than not, one parent is going to be more disciplinary and the other more nurturing.  If the disciplinarian of the two is gone, I think it could be argued that the child would be more likely to have behavioral issues that could definitely find their way into the classroom and affect a student's performance.  If the more nurturing of the two is gone, a child will miss out of that portion of parenting and could potentially have emotional problems.  It just goes to show you that these wars we are involved in the Middle East take a much greater toll than just our country's budget.  The children of this country are suffering because they aren't being raised by their parents.  Not only are we selling this country down the river by digging ourselves into deeper and deeper debt, we are damaging out kids as well.  I'm not sure which is worse, but both are awful and it needs to stop.