Aubrey J. Rodriguez

Parental Incarceration, Transnational Migration, and Military Deployment: Family Process Mechanisms of Youth Adjustment to Temporary Parent Absence

The temporary absence of a parent (e.g., due to incarceration, migration, or military deployment) is experienced by many youth and can have profound effects. Available research within these disparate literatures primarily has catalogued contextual and individual variables that influence youth adaptation, which are integrated and summarized here. In addition, we present a systematic review of proximal family processmechanisms by which youth and their family members adapt to periods of temporary parent absence. This systematic review across the different types of parent absence produced four themes: communication among family members, parenting characteristics during absence, negotiation of decision-making power and authority, and shifts in family roles. By juxtaposing the three types of temporary parent absence, we aim to bridge the separate research silos of parent absence due to incarceration, deployment, and migration, and to bring wide-ranging characteristics and processes of temporary parent-absent families into sharper focus. The review highlights possibilities for fuller integration of these literatures, and emphasizes the clinical value of considering these types of experiences from a family and relational perspective, rather than an individual coping perspective.

Stepping Up, Sticking Together: Military Adolescents’ Support of Their Civilian Parents and Concurrent Depression Symptoms

The purposes of this study were to assess the ways adolescents in active-duty military families provide emotional and instrumental support to civilian mothers and to investigate the implications of such support for their own symptoms of depression. Eighty adolescents from active-duty military families provided self-report ratings of emotional and instrumental support rendered to their civilian mothers. Mother–adolescent dyads engaged in a 10-min discussion of military experiences, which was coded for adolescents’ emotional validation of their mothers. Path analyses showed that adolescents who provided more instrumental support and showed more emotional validation reported fewer symptoms of depression. However, adolescents’ instrumental support to the mother was not inversely associated with their depression symptoms when the mothers reported high depression symptoms. Recent military demands did not moderate associations between adolescent support and depression symptoms. In this, the first study to our knowledge assessing youth-to-parent support provision among military adolescents, results suggest that emotional validation and instrumental support given at will by adolescents to their civilian mothers are associated with lower levels of adolescent depressive symptoms. Results also underscore the impact of maternal depression on family processes and emphasize the importance of careful assessment of support processes within military families.