March 2, 2017, by Carla Adams – Joining the military is a life changing experience as not only yours but your family’s life goes through a drastic upheaval. Serving in the military is drastically different from being a civilian and nowhere is it more apparent than it is when it comes down to raising children. Your military career is a source of joy and pride for you but you need to understand that your children should be brought up in a manner that they don’t miss out on anything in their childhood by developing methods to make them feel more confident, expressive and better individuals.
Military children experience different circumstances, unlike civilian kids. But still, if you know how to raise military children in the right manner and know what would make them happier and healthier children, then your child will develop a greater personality and become a great individual when it grows up. Here are some great ways to raise a happier military child to help you chart the way out more successfully:
Choosing the right School for the Child:
Association with like-minded people is integral to develop a strong sense of social bonding for any human being and military children are not different. So when it comes down to choosing a school for your military child, the best bet you have is to have your child enrolled in a military school.
There are huge advantages of enrolling military children in military schools, like developing a strong sense of patriotism, discipline, child urgent care, confidence, great education and more importantly thriving in an environment where they will get to know children whose parents are also serving in the military so they can understand and empathize with them easily. Conventional schooling is also an option but your child will be exposed to civilian children who won’t relate to your child’s experiences that easily.
Easing the process of frequent relocations:
In a serving military career, you will have to go through several relocations as you are deployed as per requirements. Changing homes, schools and cities frequently is a drastic upheaval in your children’s lives and is never easy. Put into an alien environment suddenly can make them feel unconfident and lonely, but this is where you need to step in.
Before relocation, understand the area you’ll be living in and the fun places you can visit with your children easily. You can even go to the extent of finding out if there are any of your acquaintances or friends living in that area. These factors will help you in making your children feel a high sense of comfort in the initial few days and allow them to settle down. Talk to your children before every relocation and get to know their concerns, so that you can take care of them – making your children happy.
Making up for lost time:
Missing birthdays, Christmas Eve dinners, Halloween treats, Independence days and other quite important occasions is quite a norm of being a serving military officer and so is the reality that you could be deployed away from your family for longer periods of time, making your children go through anxiety and develop a sense of loneliness. While you cannot always stop these things from happening but what you can do is to make up for lost time and make your children happy.
Whenever you get a vacation, you need to dedicate as much time as possible towards being with your children and having fun with them by taking them to parks, camping trips, hiking trips, family dinners and more, so that they can develop fond memories of the times you spent together thereby making tough times easier to negotiate for them.
Help them in making career choices and life decisions:
Every child has certain aspirations and aims in life but military children can become quite fearful of the fact that any career of decision that takes them out of the military sphere would not end up well with their parents.
You, as a parent, should always be supportive of your child’s decisions and voice your opinions as a guiding light to make them follow a more proper path, allowing them to make better and sounder decisions. If your child wants to study business in college or wants your support to understand student loans and credit score as the first step towards an independent adulthood, you need to be there every step of the way, being a mentor that your child could always turn to for advice.
Raising children in the military is tough, but if done right, your child will not only have a happy existence, it will also look down on all those years as memories which instill pride and joy after seeing their fathers and mother serve the United States by being proud military service personnel.
Author Bio: Carla Adams is an enthusiastic dreamer and a workaholic to achieve that. She is a blogger, writer, basketball player, technology and fashion freak. For all the updates follow her on Facebook.