By MICHELLE HACKMAN
Aug. 17, 2015
Students from military families are more likely to use drugs and alcohol, experience harassment at school, research shows
Soldiers from the Army’s First Infantry Division at Fort Riley in Kansas, after returning from Iraq in 2009.
Children from military families were more likely than their nonmilitary peers to report potentially harmful situations or behaviors such as experiencing violence and harassment at school, experimenting with alcohol or drugs and carrying a weapon on school grounds, according to a study published Monday in the journal JAMA Pediatrics.
The study, by researchers at the University of Southern California and Bar-Ilan University in Israel, examined data from a 2013 survey of about 689,000 middle- and high-school students from every county in California. The differences between military and nonmilitary students persisted across various school districts, accounting for different points on the socioeconomic spectrum.
“This is another diversity group that has a different culture, that has a different set of experiences,” said Ron Avi Astor, a professor of social work at the University of Southern California and a co-author of the study. “Their experiences need to be looked at, particularly in public schools,” which most military-connected children attend.
The survey, conducted by the California Department of Education, didn’t ask students to specify whether they lived in one- or two-parent homes. Mr. Astor said it is unlikely that the effects seen in the study were simply due to living with one parent rather than two, as data for socioeconomic status closely track the number of parents in a home.
Children from military backgrounds reported experiencing risky situations or behaviors across 21 categories spanning physical violence to substance abuse at a rate that was four to 10 percentage points higher than the general population, the study found. About 63% of military students experienced some kind of physical violence at school, compared with 52% of nonmilitary students. Similarly, about 66% of military students surveyed experienced social harassment, eight percentage points higher than nonmilitary peers.
The findings come on the heels of a similar study by the same researchers that found that children with military backgrounds are disproportionately vulnerable to attempting suicide.
In the U.S., there are about two million school-age children with military backgrounds, 80% of whom attend public schools, according to the Military Child Education Coalition, a nonprofit. On average, school-age children whose parents are serving move between six and nine times, according to the group.
The study, coupled with previous analyses of similar data sets, found that students’ risky behavior tended to increase with the number of deployments their parents had as well as how many school moves they had been through, Mr. Astor said.
In 2014, the Los Angeles Unified School District became the first public school district in the country to ask parents on emergency questionnaires about military involvement. The district has begun offering services—such as connecting new students with military backgrounds to buddies, as well as immediately offering intensive tutoring—to help stave off potential risky behavior.
Shelley MacDermid Wadsworth, director of the Military Family Research Institute at Purdue University, who wasn’t involved in the study, said it isn’t yet clear whether a student’s military background is the precise problem—or whether a different factor that many military families share is causing the children’s trouble in school.
“The fact that military and nonmilitary kids are different is certainly meaningful,” she said. “But we don’t know what it might be about military experience that’s producing these differences.”
Kelcey Liverpool, whose husband is deployed in Japan, said her children have found stability in a military enclave in Highwood, Ill., where the family has lived for six years. But it’s tougher on other children who move every few years, she said.
“If they were bullied in a previous duty station, they feel like, ‘I’m not going to let that happen to me again,’ ” said Ms. Liverpool, who started a group called Kids Rank, which aims to provide a safe social environment for military children. “So they might come with a guard or a fence up, and that rubs other kids the wrong way.”
Write to Michelle Hackman at Michelle.Hackman@wsj.com
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