Helping promote strong Military families.


All families deal with issues from time to time, but Military families face unique challenges, including repeated deployments. We know that strong families are critical to the well-being and stability of service members. Unfortunately, we also know that children in these families have to deal with the difficult transitions related to their parent’s deployment and reintegration, which in some cases has been shown to increase their likelihood of having emotional problems, having trouble in school, and abusing substances.

Because National Guard, Reserve, and Active Duty families do not always have access to the resources that are available to families that live on or near military installations, more outreach efforts are needed to support these families. The goal of this project is to learn about how to best accomplish this through partnerships among organizations in select North Carolina counties that want to help military families. This partnership approach, called PROSPER, is based on over 20 years of research with civilian families and focuses on the delivery of a skill-building program for parents and their 10-12-year-old children.

The program, which was originally designed for civilian families, has been adapted to meet the specific needs of National Guard, Reserve, and Active Duty Military families and a randomized controlled trial will be conducted to make sure it works.