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Hidden Wounds: Supporting Children in Military Families · Moral Injury Support Network Podcast

• 0:03
  Speaker 1: Hi, welcome to the Moral Injury Support Network podcast.
• 0:06
  Speaker 1: I'm Dr Daniel Roberts, president and CEO of Moral Injury Support Network for Service Women Incorporated.
• 0:12
  Speaker 1: Today we have a really great guest with us.
• 0:15
  Speaker 1: Dr Marge Rogers is a Senior Lecturer in Early Childhood Education at the University of New England.
• 0:23
  Speaker 1: Marge researches marginalized voices within families and education, especially in regional, rural and remote communities.
• 0:30
  Speaker 1: Specifically, she researches ways to support the well-being of military veteran and first responder families and early childhood educators.
• 0:40
  Speaker 1: Marge is a postdoctoral fellow with the Manit Institute that is building place-based research capacity to improve the mental health of regional, rural and remote Australians.
• 0:52
  Speaker 1: Marge is a lead researcher for the Child and Family Resilience Programs.
• 0:56
  Speaker 1: Along with their steering committee of affected community and partners, this team has co-created award-winning research-based free online evaluated resources for educators, parents and support workers to better support children from Australian defense veteran, first responder and remote worker families.
• 1:16
  Speaker 1: Many of these resources are currently being culturally adapted for Canadian families in collaboration with the Canadian Institute of Military Health Research, the Canadian Forces Morale Welfare Services.
• 1:25
  Speaker 1: With the Canadian Institute of Military Health Research, the Canadian Forces Morale Welfare Services, the Atlas Institute for Veterans and their Families and other Canadian partners and those with lived and living experience.
• 1:35
  Speaker 1: New resources are being co-created with these partners, along with Combat Stress and the King Center for Military Health Research UK and their affected community and partners.
• 1:46
  Speaker 1: Marge, thanks for being on the show today.
• 1:48
  Speaker 1: Welcome and we're happy to have you.
• 1:52
  Speaker 2: Great to be here, thank you.
• 1:54
  Speaker 1: So this is a really important subject.
• 1:58
  Speaker 1: My co-researchers and I over the past couple of years interviewed military spouses of service members with PTSD and so the trauma, difficulty and things they have to go through supporting a service member trying to provide for children, education, all that stuff, I mean I have a much more deeper understanding of it now, having done that research, than I ever thought imaginable.
• 2:29
  Speaker 1: So I know that the work you're doing is extremely important and I I appreciate that.
• 2:37
  Speaker 1: um thank you how did you, how did you get started in that work?
• 2:42
  Speaker 2: if you will, yeah, so I'm from Australia.
• 2:46
  Speaker 2: We had quite a lot of trips in Vietnam and that included two of my uncles.
• 2:51
  Speaker 2: One of them was impacted by perhaps moral injury, perhaps PTSD, perhaps a number of things.
• 3:00
  Speaker 2: But my cousins that I grew up with I always knew there was something interesting happening in their family, something difficult.
• 3:07
  Speaker 2: My uncle he basically drank a lot, he smoked just nonstop.
• 3:17
  Speaker 2: His hands shook all the time.
• 3:19
  Speaker 2: He would wake up suddenly and hold a knife at his children's throat.
• 3:27
  Speaker 2: He would do all sorts of things that my father said.
• 3:31
  Speaker 2: You know his brother, he would never have done that before the war.
• 3:35
  Speaker 2: This is the war, and I grew up knowing that the war had impacted him and I just realized how difficult it was for the children in his family, my cousins, and it just sort of stayed with me.
• 3:48
  Speaker 2: And then eventually I was asked to get involved with a charity research program and I was asked to write some storybooks, because I have an early childhood education background.
• 3:58
  Speaker 2: And then, once I started interviewing the families and the parents, I realized that this is something that there was a lack of resources, especially in Australia, and so it just got me thinking.
• 4:13
  Speaker 2: I ended up doing my PhD and looking at military families and the impacts on children and resources to support them, and then it sort of flowed on from there.
• 4:22
  Speaker 2: I would get service providers and parents say, hey, we need a book about this.
• 4:26
  Speaker 2: And then that would flow on to co-creating research-based resources that are free.
• 4:34
  Speaker 1: Yeah, it's amazing we're going to get into some of those and stressors and so on, but it's amazing these resources are being provided for free, and that really caught my attention.
• 4:44
  Speaker 1: It's amazing these resources are being provided for free and that really caught my attention and that's why I wanted to have you on the show, because my belief is that these are resources, you know, you designed for the UK, I mean for Australia and so on, but the trauma, the difficulty, is going to be very similar whether you're in the US, canada, the UK, if you're a military or first responder family.
• 5:09
  Speaker 1: They're going to relate to all that.
• 5:11
  Speaker 1: We'll get into the book in a minute.
• 5:13
  Speaker 1: But tell us a little bit about how parents, whether they're first responders, military personnel, how their service-related trauma and moral injury can impact family life.
• 5:26
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 5:26
  Speaker 2: So I want to preface it by saying whatever I say next or in the interview, it's not about making parents feel guilty about this.
• 5:36
  Speaker 2: They have been through unimaginable things.
• 5:40
  Speaker 2: They have witnessed or been asked to do or seen things that you know the average human doesn't.
• 5:47
  Speaker 2: So what I say it comes from a place of, you know, warmth and love and caring that it just does affect people and every parent wants to have, you know, a lot of love for their child.
• 6:05
  Speaker 2: So it's more about you know these things can happen.
• 6:09
  Speaker 2: It doesn't mean they happen to all families, but how can we support so we know that in families, if something happens to one member of the family, it ultimately impacts all members to some degree because they're an ecosystem.
• 6:25
  Speaker 2: You know it's a bit like having a garden and something really terrible happens at one end of the garden and it can't not affect the other end of the garden.
• 6:34
  Speaker 2: You know it all is in together.
• 6:38
  Speaker 2: Individuals impacted by moral injury often report family breakdown, whether that's permanent or whether it's, you know, just a separation that might happen within the household, or it could be a permanent one, and it's usually related to the distress and what we call maladaptive coping behaviour.
• 7:00
  Speaker 2: So ways that the person with moral injury is using to cope and to keep themselves alive and to keep themselves going.
• 7:09
  Speaker 2: But we call them maladaptive because they're not very helpful.
• 7:12
  Speaker 2: Right, they could be self-harm, it could be substance abuse, it could be taking a lot of risk and that's really deeply troubling for the children and for their spouses or partners.
• 7:26
  Speaker 2: Sometimes that moral injury can sit between partners, instead of it being something that is out there and the two of them you know the spouses can say you know we've got this problem and it's a moral injury and it's sitting outside of us.
• 7:43
  Speaker 2: It becomes this thing that sits between them and it can cause a lot of spousal conflict and that can be really challenging, obviously for everyone in the family, and that includes the children.
• 7:56
  Speaker 1: Yeah, that's in our interviews with military spouses.
• 8:00
  Speaker 1: One of the things they talked about to your earlier sort of preface to what you're saying is we found they're really in this conundrum because, on one hand, they are really troubled by what they see the service member doing and the turmoil it causes, and because the people that we interviewed we didn't specifically, you know, ask about severity or we didn't specifically just include people with severe PTSD, but that's who signed up for the study, all the spouses, with the exception of maybe one or two, the service members had severe PTSD.
• 8:45
  Speaker 1: But on one hand the spouse was like I don't want my children to see this and I worry about what I'm being exposed to, what my children will be exposed to, and just the daily stress of trying to survive in this environment, versus also the idea of leaving.
• 9:09
  Speaker 1: And it's not his, it's not the service members fault.
• 9:14
  Speaker 1: They served their country honorably.
• 9:16
  Speaker 1: They came back with ptsd because of what they experienced.
• 9:19
  Speaker 1: So what kind of person would I be if I left?
• 9:22
  Speaker 1: So it's it's sort like what kind of person and what kind of my mother am I?
• 9:26
  Speaker 1: Or father, because they were, you know whichever what kind of mother or father am I by leaving my kids exposed at the same time.
• 9:36
  Speaker 1: What kind of partner would I be if I left them, given all that they're struggling with?
• 9:42
  Speaker 1: So they were really in this challenging situation of trying to survive each day and not knowing which way to turn and just having all this to deal with.
• 9:54
  Speaker 2: Yeah, absolutely yeah.
• 9:56
  Speaker 2: Look, it's a really really challenging area and sometimes it's you know it changes too.
• 10:03
  Speaker 2: It's not like this is a fixed thing.
• 10:05
  Speaker 2: You know moral injury is something that can improve, especially if there's professional support, you know a loving environment and everything else.
• 10:15
  Speaker 2: But then that conundrum is real, like how much damage am I doing and how much can they take?
• 10:21
  Speaker 1: you know all that sort of thing yeah.
• 10:24
  Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, one of the things that we found out, at least in the US.
• 10:30
  Speaker 1: There's huge gaps in support for military spouses.
• 10:34
  Speaker 1: There's a lack of mental health care, a lack of child care.
• 10:39
  Speaker 1: There's a lot of resources they should be able to have access to that they don't.
• 10:44
  Speaker 1: Is that a similar problem in Australia?
• 10:49
  Speaker 2: Yeah, similar.
• 10:50
  Speaker 2: The government is trying.
• 10:52
  Speaker 2: We've just recently had a royal commission last year that was finished.
• 10:59
  Speaker 2: It ran for a number of years, for a number of years, and that's our highest level of, you know, a review or an inquiry into the impacts of like what happens to people when they do serve their country and the impacts that has on, you know, defence and veteran suicide, and also the impacts on the family and all that sort of thing.
• 11:25
  Speaker 2: And what did come out was that the supports were inadequate, the processing of the claims for veterans was inadequate, the length of time waiting for these services was inadequate.
• 11:39
  Speaker 2: So there's lots to be done.
• 11:41
  Speaker 2: I can't say what we've got going.
• 11:45
  Speaker 2: That's better than the US or Canada or worse or anything else.
• 11:48
  Speaker 2: I can't comment for that, but it is a problem.
• 11:57
  Speaker 1: It's definitely a problem.
• 11:59
  Speaker 1: Okay, okay, learning.
• 12:00
  Speaker 1: How have you seen that this moral injury in the family can affect parenting specifically?
• 12:12
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 12:12
  Speaker 2: So I think we saw like with the pandemic, when somebody had an infection, they would withdraw, right, because they don't want the members of the family to be infected.
• 12:24
  Speaker 2: And subconsciously, I don't think it's done, you know, intentionally.
• 12:29
  Speaker 2: But parents with a moral injury can sometimes withdraw, and that can be because they're feeling like they don't, they're not feeling worthy, you know, they're not feeling that they've done the right thing in the past perhaps.
• 12:45
  Speaker 2: Or they might be feeling like what you were talking about before, where I'm sort of like infecting them right, and so they might, you know, disengage a little bit.
• 12:58
  Speaker 2: They might withdraw, they might sort of go off by themselves.
• 13:05
  Speaker 2: They might be there at an event, but they might be sort of not there, you know, and they're sort of maybe disassociating, or maybe they just can't focus, or maybe it's just enough for them to get ready to go and be out in public, but when they get there they can't fully engage because all that mental effort has been in like psyching themselves up to go out, right.
• 13:31
  Speaker 2: And so, even though the parent is trying really hard, it can, for the child, look like, oh, they don't love me, or they're sort of, you know, half-hearted in their parenting.
• 13:47
  Speaker 2: The child can feel unloved, ignored or even worse, oh, like it's my fault because I didn't unstack the dishwasher or something like that.
• 13:58
  Speaker 2: You know children sort of try and make some reasoning out of it and in their world you know it's something tiny but in fact it was like this bigger than life conflict, right?
• 14:11
  Speaker 2: So we also know that when children are brought up in an environment where there's a dysregulated emotional environment, it can really affect children's development and their ability to emotionally regulate.
• 14:30
  Speaker 2: Now, if there's one parent with a moral injury, you would hope that the other partner is able to model good emotional regulation.
• 14:41
  Speaker 2: But it could be that they're impacted by what's happening in the family too.
• 14:46
  Speaker 2: So that becomes more of a problem.
• 14:49
  Speaker 2: And you know where a parent's got, say, ptsd, which you know they're bedfellows, right, you know moral injury and PTSD.
• 14:57
  Speaker 2: Sometimes children will have these internalizing and externalizing problems going on and that's been seen in some of the studies as well.
• 15:09
  Speaker 2: Also, parents can find it really challenging to talk about what they're going through and I don't mean what they went through, like why they've got the moral injury, but it's hard for them to talk about trauma-related symptoms with their children.
• 15:29
  Speaker 2: They don't know where to start.
• 15:31
  Speaker 2: They don't know how to broach the topic.
• 15:33
  Speaker 2: They don't know.
• 15:34
  Speaker 2: You know they don't sort of trust themselves to get that bit right, so sometimes they'll just ignore it.
• 15:40
  Speaker 1: Yeah, and then, of course, you would assume that all this has spillover.
• 15:48
  Speaker 1: So if the parent with moral injury is struggling to do basic parenting, that means the load shifts to the other parent who is already under stress because of.
• 16:01
  Speaker 1: Definitely stress because of, yeah, so burden can become quite heavy for everybody.
• 16:07
  Speaker 1: And then, um, you know, children have a hard time.
• 16:12
  Speaker 1: Children who are under trauma and stress and so on have a hard time learning.
• 16:16
  Speaker 1: So there's an educational impact.
• 16:18
  Speaker 1: I mean, you could really, um, you know, if you're going to do like a network chart of all the people affected, it could get quite large really.
• 16:31
  Speaker 2: Absolutely.
• 16:32
  Speaker 2: And I think too we need to remember that with service families they're often coming, you know, with a base that has been churned up.
• 16:41
  Speaker 2: You know they haven't had this one house that they grew up in, generally speaking.
• 16:46
  Speaker 2: You know they've moved a lot of times.
• 16:49
  Speaker 2: So that support network that they had, you know, in that one posting that lasted 18 months or three years, or you know that was moved.
• 16:58
  Speaker 2: And then you know those grandparents or those uncle and aunt, you know, that were great at that time of my life, and now, you know, a thousand kilometers away, and also the spouse might have had this very disrupted career.
• 17:15
  Speaker 2: They might be a little bit resentful about that, understandably, because they've sort of dedicated their life to supporting the service partner or the service parent.
• 17:28
  Speaker 2: And then the children too have had this potentially very disrupted friendship group, a disrupted education perhaps, and so you've got all these factors sort of playing into it.
• 17:43
  Speaker 2: It's not like the moral injury happened after this sort of fairy tale childhood.
• 17:49
  Speaker 2: Often, you know, it's usually come after a series of events, which makes it much harder for those coping strategies to kick in.
• 18:02
  Speaker 1: Yeah, that makes sense.
• 18:03
  Speaker 1: So your work and your partners have created a book right Like a free book and some other resources.
• 18:21
  Speaker 1: Tell us about the resources that you've put together to help families.
• 18:28
  Speaker 2: Yeah, so we've got a big suite of four programs, basically four suites of modules.
• 18:34
  Speaker 2: One is for the children, another suite is for the parents, another one is for the children's educators and another one again is for the support workers and clinicians.
• 18:50
  Speaker 2: So the content in those have all been co-created and I just want to talk a little bit about what that means.
• 18:57
  Speaker 2: So it means it's not just a bunch of academics sitting around like writing stuff, you know, and coming up with stuff from research.
• 19:07
  Speaker 2: It's people with lived and living experience that are helping us to create these.
• 19:12
  Speaker 2: We've got psychologists, social workers, family support workers, psychiatrists, educators, parents and other family members within these communities, advocacy groups, veterans, you know, ex-service organizations.
• 19:32
  Speaker 2: Lots of people are coming together to write these modules.
• 19:36
  Speaker 2: The other group of resources that we have that fit with the modules are these research-based storybooks, which sound very simple.
• 19:47
  Speaker 2: But the way that we've created them again, co-created them, is by taking the narratives that people give us very generously, that have lived experience in these families, and they'll say something like this happened to us, you know.
• 20:04
  Speaker 2: And then we'll gather lots of those narratives, we'll match them with the themes that are in the research, in the literature, and then we will sort of combine narratives and then we'll take the narratives that seem to be very common.
• 20:20
  Speaker 2: So this seems to be a really common theme that comes up in a topic like moral injury, where somebody in a family has moral injury.
• 20:29
  Speaker 2: Then we look at the less common ones and we go, okay, well, maybe we'll include those as well.
• 20:34
  Speaker 2: And then we have the outliers where you know that's only cropped up that story one time, so we might not include that because you know every family is different.
• 20:45
  Speaker 2: Yeah, right.
• 20:46
  Speaker 2: And so then we weave those together and you know I'm a storyteller and we weave those together and you know I'm a storyteller and we weave those together and we come up with a narrative.
• 20:56
  Speaker 2: We have like a character, and the main character is usually a child and they experience some of these things that are fairly common in these families.
• 21:06
  Speaker 2: At the very beginning of the storybook we have forwards that are written by people either with lived or living experience or practitioners who work with these families, and then we have the story itself and it's illustrated by a children's, you know, illustrator, storybook illustrator.
• 21:25
  Speaker 2: End of that we have activities to deepen the sort of conversations between the child and the parent or, you know, the support worker or the clinician, because it's a bibliotherapy book.
• 21:40
  Speaker 2: And then at the end we have three or four pages of what we call plain English research-based information and we keep it as simple as we can, but it's to connect the parents and the clinicians and other people who are reading the book with the research so they don't think, oh, I thought it was just my child who was complaining about that or I thought it was just our family, that you know we're experiencing this and make them realize they're not alone.
• 22:12
  Speaker 2: We also link it to supports.
• 22:14
  Speaker 2: You know like, go to this page and you'll find some supports, and on that we'll have our partners.
• 22:19
  Speaker 2: So we've got our Canadian partners, we'll put their supports, our UK partners will put theirs, and obviously we have our Australian ones as well, and then we update that as we go along.
• 22:30
  Speaker 2: But those narratives then can be read.
• 22:34
  Speaker 2: The story can be read between an adult and the child.
• 22:39
  Speaker 2: It's not for general classroom reading.
• 22:42
  Speaker 2: We do have some books on other topics not moral injury that can be read in a classroom or in a learning environment, in an early childhood setting, say, or a school environment.
• 22:53
  Speaker 2: But these ones about complex PTSD or a parent with a physical injury or a moral injury, these are what we call bibliotherapy books.
• 23:03
  Speaker 2: They're only for the children that are already experiencing this in their family.
• 23:09
  Speaker 2: So that's a really important point that it's very much a therapy-based book.
• 23:15
  Speaker 2: But they're totally available.
• 23:18
  Speaker 2: They're available for your families as well.
• 23:21
  Speaker 2: We think there are universal themes there.
• 23:25
  Speaker 2: You might see some things that look slightly different than what might in your country.
• 23:31
  Speaker 2: There could be a language a little bit, but the overall theme is very workable, you know, in our allied countries really.
• 23:40
  Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, so that's fascinating.
• 23:43
  Speaker 1: It sounds like it's a great resource, a great set of resources really, for parents and families and educators.
• 23:53
  Speaker 1: You mentioned too, right, um, so, and so you have canadian, uk, australian partners.
• 24:00
  Speaker 1: You mentioned, I think you said, if someone's living in the us, this is still valuable information for them yeah, and look the storybooks.
• 24:09
  Speaker 2: I mean now our children.
• 24:11
  Speaker 2: Children read American storybooks, right, and you know we all love each other.
• 24:17
  Speaker 2: It's like we don't have bears in the woods, but our children will get just as much joy reading a book about a bear, you know, than they will about a kangaroo, right?
• 24:27
  Speaker 2: So in our books you will see some kangaroo stories and some koala stories and things like that.
• 24:32
  Speaker 2: But I mean, they're sort of universal themes that we're talking about, so it's, it's a really important one.
• 24:39
  Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, well, I like to watch um, this little I.
• 24:44
  Speaker 1: I like to watch british shows wherever I can find them, just because it's a different.
• 24:50
  Speaker 1: You know it's.
• 24:51
  Speaker 1: It's like a little bit different thing, different exposure, but there I can understand the language I can understand and the the like scenarios they're in are very similar.
• 25:03
  Speaker 1: So the drama still works and everything, but it's got a little bit of a different flavor to it, which is fun and different.
• 25:09
  Speaker 1: So I think American families would enjoy that that bit too.
• 25:18
  Speaker 2: Also on that, the Moral Injury Storybook was actually written with Canadians as well.
• 25:26
  Speaker 1: So I guess you've got it's not exactly American, but you've got that North American- flavor to it which I think will possibly make it a little bit closer to home for you as well yeah, um, one thing I'm curious about is I would love you know I'm thinking about I would love to have resource, us resources there too, and I wonder if, if, if there's a, certainly our organization wants to hear this information, but there may be others who are listening that are like, oh, we, we could provide some great resources.
• 26:04
  Speaker 1: We'd love to, like partner with you, be part of that.
• 26:07
  Speaker 1: Is there any opportunity for that?
• 26:09
  Speaker 2: or absolutely, absolutely, absolutely.
• 26:11
  Speaker 2: We're not exclusive.
• 26:13
  Speaker 2: We don't make any money out of this.
• 26:16
  Speaker 2: We do it because we have a passion for supporting children and families who have served, and if you send me a list of resources, I can put it up on the site for your families as well, if that's going to help you and help your listeners as well as well, if that's going to help you and help your listeners as well.
• 26:36
  Speaker 2: We're about children.
• 26:36
  Speaker 2: We're about, you know, making sure we're giving back to people who have done a lot for us, you know, and we don't often recognize what they've done, and we certainly, in our line of work, and yours too, see the impact of what they've done for us.
• 26:49
  Speaker 1: So, yeah, yeah, no, this is great.
• 26:52
  Speaker 1: We're my, my organization is partnering with another group that are working with schools to help.
• 27:02
  Speaker 1: They're getting ready to start their school year in a couple of weeks, so we're working with some school districts to help prepare them for trauma.
• 27:14
  Speaker 1: And families military families first response.
• 27:17
  Speaker 1: So this is this is great, great conversation for thinking about that, what they need to know, what can help them, and so on, cause it's, it's challenging If you, you have, you know, moral injuries becoming a term that is becoming more and more familiar in military and first responder circles, but it's still largely unknown.
• 27:40
  Speaker 1: But when you expand that and you think about education, business, other areas, you're really at least in the US like you're really cutting a new uh trail in the forest because it's things people haven't heard of.
• 27:55
  Speaker 1: I, I've, I found that people can instantly relate to the term.
• 28:00
  Speaker 1: When you explain what moral injury is, people go, oh, I totally get that fact, I have it or I know something, whatever.
• 28:06
  Speaker 1: But until you hear it, it's just like what is that you know?
• 28:12
  Speaker 2: yeah and look part of what we do with our modules is really about community awareness.
• 28:17
  Speaker 2: So so we're talking about educators before and, um, all of our resources, um, the storybooks, the modules, everything in them is published under what we call a creative Commons license, so it's open access.
• 28:32
  Speaker 2: So that means if you know the schools that you were talking about, if they see something in the educator modules and they think this would be great professional development for our educators, you know you can cut and paste that and they can put it in a newsletter and then they can Americanize it.
• 28:50
  Speaker 2: You know, if you need to change the spelling or the way we work, the lingo, and that's really, you know, something that can be done.
• 28:57
  Speaker 2: And as long as you acknowledge where it first came from, that's absolutely fine.
• 29:02
  Speaker 2: And we're really into sharing information because I think the money that is there or should I say the money that is not there for the children in these families, it makes it that we have to work together.
• 29:18
  Speaker 2: We have to build capacity to support the children in these families, because they are largely being ignored, what happens for them?
• 29:31
  Speaker 2: And I think if we ignore them, then how is it that we're going to encourage people to join the armed forces in future, because there's a lot of, in Australia, multi-generational households.
• 29:43
  Speaker 2: Well, if they're growing up in a household where they're struggling with all these things, why would they go and serve?
• 29:49
  Speaker 2: You know, that makes it really difficult as well.
• 29:53
  Speaker 1: Right and I think there's a larger issue with all that is something, again, my organization is trying to do, others are trying to do, is educating military leaders on moral injury, how it happens this kind of stuff.
• 30:08
  Speaker 1: There are some.
• 30:08
  Speaker 1: The only way to prevent completely prevent moral injury and PTSD in war is not do it.
• 30:33
  Speaker 1: But but there's a lot of other things that a lot of other moral injurious experiences that military and first responders are experienced have nothing to do with combat.
• 30:36
  Speaker 1: It's toxic leadership.
• 30:37
  Speaker 1: It's policies and decisions that are made without thought about how it's affecting families.
• 30:39
  Speaker 1: One of the things that we found in our research is you know, to be quite honest with you, the US military is very good about narratives about how much they care about family, family support and all that.
• 30:50
  Speaker 1: Good about narratives about how much they care about family, family support and all that.
• 30:55
  Speaker 1: It's mostly bs, because the real support families need often are things like stability and mental health support, not just for the service member, but for the spouse, also for the kids.
• 31:08
  Speaker 1: There's not enough resources for that, so so it ends up being like family support is about tea parties and family getting briefings and all this other stuff, but really comes down to what families really, really need.
• 31:24
  Speaker 1: It's just not there and commanders really don't want to think about it that much and and they certainly the policies don't support it in that.
• 31:36
  Speaker 1: But military leaders are largely unaware of the impact that all these things are having on families, which tells you a couple things.
• 31:50
  Speaker 1: One, they're blind to probably what's going on in their own families in many cases.
• 31:54
  Speaker 1: But two, they don't get too much focus on just getting the mission done or whatever, not on the impact of families.
• 32:06
  Speaker 1: A lot of policies about how often people move and deploy, and all that are done without any consideration for the family at all.
• 32:16
  Speaker 1: And having worked in the military for three decades, being a service member, and you know, at my last position I was very much involved with these high-level policies.
• 32:28
  Speaker 1: What you don't realize when you're at lower levels is that all these policies could be changed, some quite easily, and there just isn't any like real interest in changing those.
• 32:43
  Speaker 1: There's just a, an exception, an assumption.
• 32:46
  Speaker 1: This is just the way it is.
• 32:49
  Speaker 2: And it's been like that for a hundred years.
• 32:51
  Speaker 1: Yeah, and I've talked to senior leaders and said have you ever thought about this, you know?
• 32:57
  Speaker 1: And they looked at me like I had two heads, like it never occurred to them that something, uh, change like that was even you know, and it wasn't a major thing, it was just you know, you have these issues.
• 33:13
  Speaker 1: You're talking about what, if you just did that keep people in positions longer and it was like, you know, they didn't know what to do with that.
• 33:25
  Speaker 1: Because this, you know, this is just the way it is kind of thing.
• 33:30
  Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, it's what they know too.
• 33:31
  Speaker 2: You know, it's what's familiar to them, so yeah yeah, so, uh, so we.
• 33:39
  Speaker 1: So these resources are free, they're online.
• 33:41
  Speaker 1: We'll have the website and all that in the show notes, but just for people listening, what's the website or the best way to take a look at these resources, access them and so on?
• 33:57
  Speaker 2: Yeah, so if you just do a browser search for Child and Family Resilience Programs, and you'll come across our website and from there you can click on our interactives and you can explore the books.
• 34:09
  Speaker 2: We have got some in English, obviously, but we've also got some in Canadian friendship.
• 34:17
  Speaker 2: That's a help to anyone if you have bilingual families as well.
• 34:21
  Speaker 2: But also we have different topics.
• 34:25
  Speaker 2: We've got little, you know different areas that you might want to have a look at.
• 34:30
  Speaker 2: Obviously we've got stuff about moral injury and physical injuries and complex PTSD.
• 34:36
  Speaker 2: We've got a book coming out later this year, but we've got also just general remembrance, you know, ceremonies that a lot of these children have to attend, and we've also got books for current serving members on postings, relocations, deployments, you know, all that sort of thing that could be happening in their family.
• 34:59
  Speaker 2: So it's a bit broader than just the mental health and the moral injury.
• 35:02
  Speaker 2: Lots of topics in there.
• 35:04
  Speaker 2: But we had a lot of requests from service providers to do the moral injury.
• 35:06
  Speaker 2: Lots of topics in there.
• 35:06
  Speaker 2: But we had a lot of requests from service providers to do the moral injury book because they said you know the children really need some support in this area.
• 35:16
  Speaker 1: Yeah, that's amazing.
• 35:18
  Speaker 1: That's a lot of stuff, so you're obviously getting some great financial support and other resources to support to be able to do this right.
• 35:32
  Speaker 2: Well, that would be great.
• 35:33
  Speaker 2: No, we don't.
• 35:36
  Speaker 2: We got some good funding, originally from a philanthropic organization, just to start it up, and then from then on, we've just got very, very tiny grants, and that means that we can just pay for a graphic designer and then we use in-kind support.
• 35:55
  Speaker 2: So what I mean by that is just saying, hey, you know, are you able to help with this?
• 36:02
  Speaker 2: You know, we'll ask another university or a service provider and we'll say, can you give us your expertise?
• 36:08
  Speaker 2: And then they'll give us their expertise to help with that just their time, basically.
• 36:14
  Speaker 2: So we're not flush with cash.
• 36:17
  Speaker 2: That would be amazing.
• 36:18
  Speaker 2: I would have an admin worker straight away and I could focus on the research.
• 36:23
  Speaker 2: But no, we just work from project to project and we partner with organisations who say, oh, we've saved up just enough to pay for the illustrator or that type of thing.
• 36:35
  Speaker 2: So that's sort of how we work.
• 36:36
  Speaker 2: We do want funding so that we could evaluate the books really properly.
• 36:42
  Speaker 2: We do ask what we do is we release a draft book every time?
• 36:48
  Speaker 2: We do it online and we have a survey and we ask for feedback and then we adapt the books before we release them properly to improve them.
• 36:58
  Speaker 2: And so we do get feedback, but what we want to do is sort of like a more thorough evaluation to make sure that we're, you know, on the right track, and that helps us then to leverage more, you know, potential grant funding so that we could do further work with our partners as well.
• 37:16
  Speaker 2: So that's sort of how it works at the moment, but it's really.
• 37:20
  Speaker 2: It's really week to week payday, right.
• 37:24
  Speaker 1: Yeah, no, I totally get that.
• 37:25
  Speaker 1: Is there a way for people to donate on your page?
• 37:29
  Speaker 2: Not at the moment, but we can have a look at that, maybe a GoFundMe page or something.
• 37:34
  Speaker 1: Yeah, but yeah, that's a great idea.
• 37:36
  Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, okay, yeah.
• 37:39
  Speaker 1: No, running a nonprofit, I totally get that.
• 37:43
  Speaker 1: I totally get that.
• 37:43
  Speaker 1: It's like, I mean, that's just part of the struggle, if you will, about probably running any business, I mean, but with nonprofits it's a unique set of challenges when it comes to funding and stuff, and so it sounds like you're being very wise and your ability to, you know, get pro bono resources and stuff to kick, cause you know everything you explained that's a lot.
• 38:17
  Speaker 1: You have a lot.
• 38:17
  Speaker 1: You've been able to do a little and that's you know.
• 38:22
  Speaker 1: I'm really proud of you for that, cause that's that's you know.
• 38:24
  Speaker 1: You know I'm really proud of you for that, because that's you know, a lot of emotional and physical effort into those things.
• 38:34
  Speaker 2: Yeah, thank you.
• 38:35
  Speaker 2: And look, I think it may be very different in your country, but in our country we have the problem of most of the funding for veterans is for the veteran, and I'm not saying it shouldn't be, but there also needs to be extra money, and I'm not saying, take any away from the veteran because goodness knows they need it.
• 38:56
  Speaker 2: But there needs to be extra money put aside for the families and the children so that we don't have these generational impacts.
• 39:05
  Speaker 2: You know it's bad enough that you have the service member, but you know it wasn't like the children signed up for that right, right.
• 39:13
  Speaker 2: So it's a really problematic area.
• 39:17
  Speaker 2: And another thing that we find with funding.
• 39:20
  Speaker 2: You know, when we ask funders for money they go oh well, you know the military should be paying for that.
• 39:25
  Speaker 1: And you're saying well, actually, yeah, okay, it's not how it works the military pay for the weapons and pay for the training to defend the country.
• 39:33
  Speaker 2: It's actually not in their mindset to be supporting the families.
• 39:38
  Speaker 2: I mean, I wish it was, but it's sort of not where Australia is at at the moment.
• 39:42
  Speaker 2: We're looking at family support, yeah.
• 39:45
  Speaker 2: Yeah, no it's exactly like the US.
• 39:50
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, it's a very, very similar set of problems.
• 39:53
  Speaker 1: You do have a good number of philanthropic organizations, private foundations, that do some support to veterans and families.
• 40:13
  Speaker 1: In terms of the military, it's like, well, that's the VA's job and they don't you know.
• 40:19
  Speaker 1: So, yeah, it's a very similar problem.
• 40:21
  Speaker 1: The VA is the Veterans Administration is authorized to help family members, is the Veterans Administration is authorized to help family members, but all their resources are ate up with supporting military families and so on.
• 40:32
  Speaker 1: So this is another reason why, yeah, this is a really important resource.
• 40:38
  Speaker 1: So I had a couple more questions, had a couple more questions um, what kind of feedback have you gotten um from families?
• 40:53
  Speaker 2: and stuff that have used the books.
• 40:54
  Speaker 2: The reason, yeah, well, I might read out a few little comments that'd be great yeah, okay, it says this is from a support worker.
• 41:01
  Speaker 2: I've actually shared it with some families recently, which has been the catalyst to seek mental health support, as they didn't realize the impact their moral injury was having on the kids.
• 41:11
  Speaker 2: These are families I've worked with for so long and nothing has hit them so hard and so honestly as that book did.
• 41:19
  Speaker 2: It's a game changer for understanding.
• 41:22
  Speaker 2: Another comment here says it made me cry.
• 41:28
  Speaker 2: I believe that all efforts to address the perplexity of mental injury for children are worthy of support.
• 41:36
  Speaker 2: Speaking as a child who lived through it myself, having any level of understanding at all would have made a positive effect on my childhood, and that's from a veteran family member.
• 41:49
  Speaker 2: I'll read you something, though, from a first responder parent who read it actually to his adult children.
• 41:59
  Speaker 2: So he says it's timely.
• 42:02
  Speaker 2: Even now, as I'm still currently processing the injuries, I've found a way to share it with them.
• 42:09
  Speaker 2: This is his children, even though they're now young adults.
• 42:12
  Speaker 2: When they hurt from my actions or inactions, they become wounded children.
• 42:17
  Speaker 2: I've reached out for additional support and continue to address the unseen wounds.
• 42:23
  Speaker 2: This book gave a safe narrative to my story and they are seeing a change.
• 42:29
  Speaker 2: So another one here says this wee book provides the clearest explanation yet of the origins and initial steps towards explaining and solving a highly complex problem that, as veterans, my husband and I have been grappling with for the past 62 years.
• 42:51
  Speaker 2: The prologue and epilogue are particularly satisfying, as they help us adults to understand the why before it all.
• 43:00
  Speaker 2: Another one said wow.
• 43:03
  Speaker 2: When I first started reading it, I thought it was too simplistic and valid, maybe for a three or four year old.
• 43:10
  Speaker 2: I changed my mind very quickly.
• 43:13
  Speaker 2: The further I read, especially once I got to the more clinical descriptions at the back, the more it hit me and made me so sad that this book wasn't around when my husband's kids and granddaughter were younger, realizing what a difference it may have made if they had understood what was happening with him.
• 43:33
  Speaker 2: I will be exploring this with my girls and grandkids.
• 43:37
  Speaker 2: They have a pretty solid understanding of his experiences, but this explanation is so much better than ours have been.
• 43:45
  Speaker 2: Thank you for sharing this.
• 43:47
  Speaker 2: I'm going to snuggle my husband now.
• 43:51
  Speaker 1: Nice, yeah, so that's really good.
• 43:54
  Speaker 1: People are getting a lot out of it, and I found that my approach to books are the same thing.
• 44:03
  Speaker 1: I recently published a couple of moral injury guidebooks one for military leaders, one for women, veterans but they're only about a hundred pages and they're really designed to be what you called I think you said plain English or lay, lay person's terms about moral injury, what you can do about it, different things, because it's, you know, there's writing for academia and that's a certain style and that's that's good for that.
• 44:34
  Speaker 1: But if you're, if you're talking about people with lived experience and how they can use it, it's got to be written in a way that that, you know, is language, that that they relate to Um and so, and so you know that last comment about thought it was too, too low age and then and then it's like, wow, actually this simplicity is really helpful on that.
• 45:01
  Speaker 1: That's important, that's good, absolutely yeah.
• 45:07
  Speaker 1: So, as we wrap up, um's the big project that you all are working on.
• 45:11
  Speaker 1: Now, what is it your team is doing?
• 45:14
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 45:15
  Speaker 2: So we get approached by people with lived experience and service providers.
• 45:20
  Speaker 2: They come to us with ideas.
• 45:21
  Speaker 2: They say, hey, we need a book about this or we need a module about that.
• 45:25
  Speaker 2: So we've got three on the go at the moment.
• 45:27
  Speaker 2: The first one that will come out later this year that you can look out for on our website and provide us with a bit of feedback when we put it up in draft form, is a book about complex PTSD.
• 45:41
  Speaker 2: So that sometimes goes hand in hand with moral injury as well, so it could be something your readers are quite interested in.
• 45:49
  Speaker 2: So it's for children whose parents have complex PTSD.
• 45:53
  Speaker 2: Another one is actually the benefits of growing up in a service family.
• 45:58
  Speaker 2: So we're looking at those what we call protective factors or coping strategies that are very strong in service families and you know the positives about that family life.
• 46:10
  Speaker 2: You know getting to see different parts of the countryside, maybe even an overseas posting, having that tight-knit service family community.
• 46:18
  Speaker 2: That can be really beneficial and strong and the willingness to embrace change.
• 46:24
  Speaker 2: So we're looking at some of those positives in another book and then a different book.
• 46:28
  Speaker 2: The third one that probably won't come out till early 2026 is a book for children whose parents actually divorce or separate while they're in a service family.
• 46:40
  Speaker 2: So, going back to what we were talking about previously, with those stresses that can sometimes cause separation or divorce, the challenge is that in those families that are still currently serving, or even veteran families, that can be problematic because of you know, like, if they're still serving, they're postings and it could be that they're living in separate parts of the country, and so there can be a lot of challenges there for the children who are navigating, seeing different parents at different times.
• 47:12
  Speaker 2: So, yeah, I'm looking forward to working on those.
• 47:17
  Speaker 1: Okay, good, Well, again, I really appreciate the work you and your team is doing, and doing it out of the goodness of your heart and a real passion for these uh, families, uh, and a willingness to help, so I'm really appreciative.
• 47:35
  Speaker 1: I'm happy we're going to have all that on on the podcast notes and the social media pages and stuff so that people can access these resources.
• 47:44
  Speaker 1: But thank you so much for being on the show and I look forward to just seeing the more stuff as it comes out.
• 47:56
  Speaker 2: Yeah, terrific, and any of your listeners can jump on our website.
• 48:00
  Speaker 2: We've got a contact form there and if there's any ideas they have for the next storybooks, also for any modules that they want to see created, we we um certainly have that available for them to to give their input as well right, okay, great, thanks so much that's okay.